Comments on: Netflix’s 10 Year Sustained Bandwidth is 200 Gigabits Per Second!

By: mathew

mathew — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:23:35 +0000

the 200 Gbps number!It let me very surprised as well.

By: Mikael

Mikael — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:41:12 +0000

Heh. Assuming a linear increase from 0 DVDs ten years ago to max today Netflix are shipping out 3200 petabyte of data this year. That is around 755 gigabits per second or 12 DVDs delivered every second, 24/7 for a whole year.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:42:39 +0000

Thanks for all the comments, and for pointing out the dual-layer issue as well as the fact that if served online, they'd be compressed using a more efficient codec, which probably means the average size of a video in a real-world streaming situation is probably closer to 1GB.

Even if you drop my 4GB per disc estimate by a factor of four, and then increase to what Netflix's actuall daily volume is *today* (as opposed to a 10 year average), those two factors probably cancel each other out, and you probably wind up with something in the neighborhood of my original estimate of 200 Gbps if Netflix were actually serving all of their videos on demand today. And I don't think there's many (maybe YouTube?) sites out there today that could claim that kind of throughput.

By: Philip Reynolds

Philip Reynolds — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:53:35 +0000

I think you've missed the point slightly which was about bandwidth _actually_ consumed.

By: Kimmo Glaborg

Kimmo Glaborg — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 07:02:21 +0000

Great post! Here is some other good reading in the matter. Streamfile's take on file transfers and shuffling data in general. http://www.streamfile.com/transfers

By: Craig Hughes

Craig Hughes — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 01:18:44 +0000

Yeah, who would transfer whole DVDs online? Actually thepiratebay.org probably gives a decent sense for how many DVDs are single-layer vs dual for estimating Netflix's offline bandwidth.

By: Deyan Vitanov

Deyan Vitanov — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:36:52 +0000

Well, one could take the opposite view and say that actually encoded movies are about ~700MB a piece (using Xvid or DivX or similar) – which would make sense if you are making a comparison with online transfer, because no one would start transfering raw DVDs. Great post!

By: Craig Hughes

Craig Hughes — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:19:33 +0000

Not only are most commercial video DVDs dual-layered, many are also double-sided, with a letterbox version on one side and pan-and-scan on the reverse, for a total of 16GB. So Netflix could be up around 1/2 terabit per second average, depending on the ratios.

By: Chris McGarry

Chris McGarry — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:43:00 +0000

Very interesting observation! Following on Ross' comment, average feature size (the movie itself minus bonus DVD content) is prob around 6 GB.

By: Ross

Ross — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:42:35 +0000

That's great Ryan – the only thing I'd add is your calculations are off by roughly half, a comerical DVD is 8.5 GB, not 4.7 (they are dual layer). So really it's just about double this, again in very rough math. But holy wow, who know the USPS could sustain such bandwidth!