I don’t know where to ask this question so if this is the wrong place then I can take direction.
I was thinking about my plex server and my upload speed and the number of clients I could serve. I have the 4k release of the Thing where the average bitrate is close to 100Mbps. I could maybe serve 5 people on my setup if they all played that.
Then I got to thinking about Netflix, Disney, etc. and how they all serve 4k files to millions of people. That’s an enormous amount of data they’re pushing out to the internet.
If they’re serving an average bitrate file of 50Mbps to a million people? Dude that upload speed is ridiculous. Do they really have upload speeds that high or am I missing something here
Netflix has special servers in most ISPs data centers that cache the most popular content so you don’t have to go ‘all the way over the Internet’ to stream your show, just the same building your traffic already goes to for internet ingress.
On top of this, Netflix has special video codecs designed to minimize bandwidth usage while preserving video quality.
Finally, yes, Netflix has massive Internet pipes for everything not cached ‘near you’.
Yes, you are missing the thousands of servers AWS has to provide for Netflix to work the way it does. You also forget the edge caches and the peering and CDN they use for the actual file to be streamed. It’s using thousands of server in dozens of countries and peering via hundreds of ISP and exchanges.
Or did you think they had a few hundred servers streaming from a few 100G uplinks?
The best quality streamer I have found is Apple TV+ which seems to range in the 25mb/s range for 4K content.