Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

[Jimmy Hess <mysidia () gmail com>]

On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 12:43 PM, Matthew Petach <mpetach () netflight com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 10:17 AM, Todd Lyons <tlyons () ivenue com> wrote:
> > On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Matthew Petach <mpetach () netflight com>
> > wrote:
> > Because that Netflix box is not an on-demand cache, it gets a bunch of
> > shows pushed to it that may or may not be watched by any of Brett's
> > customers.  Then the bandwidth he must use to preload that box is
> > large, much larger than the sum of the streams his customers do watch.

However.....  (1) There are other considerations besides bandwidth
saved: there is customer experience improvement if latency and
therefore load times decrease.

 (2) You or a cache box don't know which streams your customers will
watch in advance.   Although the cache units preload popular content,
not necessarily the entire catalog.    Your users are most likely
watch during peak hours, which is the time at which more bandwidth is
the most expensive...   at most other times, additional bandwidth
usage is $0,
so it doesn't strictly matter, necessarily, if more total transfer is
required using a cache box than not.

(3) If you don't have at least a couple Gigabits of Netflix traffic,
you are unlikely to consider undertaking the expense of the  SLA
requirements before you can run a box, electricity, space  in the
first place,  if you even meet the traffic minimums required to get
free cache boxes.

And  (4)   The  "pushing of shows to the units" occur  during a
configured fill window,   which their guides say will be defined by
the provider's network planning team in a manner and maximum bandwidth
demand over that time suited to your traffic profile, so as to not
increase the 95-th percentile traffic from your upstream.

For example: the fill window can occur during the hours of the day
when there is little interactive customer traffic.  They recommend a
10 to 12 hour fill window with a maximum rate of 1.2 Gigabits.

http://oc.nflxvideo.net/docs/OpenConnect-Deployment-Guide.pdf


Therefore, in any of the cases where cache boxes have actually been
implemented properly,  they are still likely to be a net benefit  for
both provider and customers.

> Thank you for clarifying that; I thought what
> Brett was concerned about was traffic in
> the downstream direction, not traffic for
> populating the appliance.
--
-JH