While I was on break Netflix announed the launch of a content delivery Network called Open Connect.
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.
What's interesting about Open Connect is that Netflix is sharing how they're doing this for free, explaining the hardware design and making the Open Connect software open source. Information about Open Connect, including details about the hardware & software, can be found online at http://openconnect.netflix.com/.
There was a bit of a fuss when this was announced, but Dan Rayburn (more informed about this topic than me), tries to explain what this means to companies like Akamai, Level 3 and Limelight.
Congrats to the team, another good addition to Netflix :)
Posted by: Alabama iPhone Game Developers | June 22, 2012 at 09:09 AM