What do they do all day? Pressing play and getting video already works, and you can’t program your way out of Netflix’s existential threat of nobody renewing their streaming licenses.
I feel like maintaining the infrastructure for the mammoth amount of data they must serve each day would be quite a lot of work on its own. They can't really afford hiccups in service, and I don't recall the site ever being down or a video not loading recently.
Netflix does a lot of work on reliability/availability and are known for being good at it - they've actually open-sourced a lot of their tooling too.
That's right. Search for Netflix OSS. Their infra tooling for the cloud is amazing, and something to aspire too. I'm an outsider and have always admired them.
Cost optimization via more efficient software, customer engagement via better predictive analytics, etc.