Around the
world, people are enjoying nearly a billion hours per month of movies and TV
shows from Netflix. We’ve been
delivering these petabytes of data exclusively through commercial content
delivery networks.
Now, in
addition to these general-purpose commercial CDNs, we are enabling ISPs to get
Netflix video data from Open Connect, a single-purpose Netflix content delivery
network we’ve established. The world’s
other major Internet video provider, YouTube, has long had its own content
delivery network. Given our size and growth, it now makes economic sense for
Netflix to have one as well. We’ll
continue to work with our commercial CDN partners for the next few years, but
eventually most of our data will be served by Open Connect.
Like
commercial CDNs, Open Connect will provide the Netflix data at no cost to the
locations the ISP desires, or ISPs can choose to get the Netflix data at common
internet exchanges. About 5% of Netflix
data is already being served by Open Connect. Interested ISPs can find full
details at: openconnect.netflix.com.
As part of
Open Connect, we are also sharing our hardware design and the open source
software components of the server. These
cost-efficient designs are suitable for any high-volume provider of large media
files. We welcome commentary and
improvements, which will be shared with the community with the goal of a
faster, less expensive Internet for all.
Ken Florance
Ken Florance is Vice President of Content Delivery at Netflix
