How does Netflix stream movies?

List of netflix streaming movies? How about..how do they get those movies to your TV?

During the highest peak hours, Netflix can be as high as a third of all internet traffic used in the USA! Crazy right?
How do they manage to stream all of their movies to everyone so seamlessly? Lets find out.

Netflix streaming movies


The main way they stream all that data: Netflix has its own content delivery network!.
A content delivery network is a basically a group of servers that can store data near to the locations where it will be watched.
This reduces the bandwidth used by a huge amount, and also makes it much easier to provide their streams over a huge area. For the massive list of Netflix streaming movies, this is essential.

Prior to Netflix having its own network, they used a 3rd party company to do their caching for them. However a couple years ago they turned on their very own network that is much much more powerful and massive.
Netflix has also created their very own storage hardware. They custom built and made their hardware just for streaming internet video.
Their technology uses both hard drive technology merged with flash drive technology to create the best of both worlds in storage and power.
The hard drive tech does the most work though. They are crazy big and store up to 100TB of data..each! Each server handles 10k to 20k streams at one time.

netflix movie streaming servers

To keep everything updated, Netflix always re-designs its servers about once a year. You might be wondering...how do they get the list of netflix streaming movies uploaded to the servers? They load up every server manually! This saves them extra bandwidth and prevents them having to update terrebytes of data over the network.
The total space used on all the servers combined is over a Petabyte! To help the network even more with the bandwidth, during slow down times, the servers actually pre-load the most popular shows to save on processing power.

Netflix connects their network to the users at ISP data centers, or sometimes even the ISPs directly. Netflix will ask to install their equipment at the ISPs location no charge at all.
This gives Netflix superior control over their network design and allows them to optimize everything perfectly

One might think this huge of an operation would need a large staff to maintain. However, only about 40 people work to keep the network running.
The next time you fire up your Netflix stream and enjoy your movies, take a moment to appreciate the massive amount of technology and planning that was needed to display the list of Netflix streaming movies in your home.