Aren't they literally giving money to their competitor?
You cannot get a silky smooth experience across that many congested networks with just bare AWS.
Why would Netflix want to take on the enormous risks of self-hosting? They don't have the experience and they don't have the skills. They can hire the appropriate people but it's extremely expensive. AWS provides a lot of very valuable tooling and expertise baked into the service price.
In a way, they're allocating money and resources to Amazon rather than developing internally simply because the long-term ROI doesn't warrant it.
And let's not discount the most obvious reason why it's probably not even a concern for Netflix: Amazon Prime Video sucks. Sure, Blockbuster probably said the same thing about Netflix at one point, but it's hindsight. I think most people, at the time, would have never guessed Netflix would be the one to pivot to online streaming either.
It's a very though provoking question and there's no way to distill it into one answer, so I'm just providing my POV.
To clarify, I am not expecting them to build their own cloud, but why they using it when other providers have caught up pretty much.
It wouldn't surprise me if Netflix had that meeting at some point. What would it cost them to run their own infrastructure? Would that be less than the cost of staying with AWS? Is Amazon exploiting their position as Netflix's hosting provider to unfairly compete with them? Do they fear that they might in the future?
At the end of the day, the answer was very likely a solid "no". Many industries are full of examples of competitors working together to the benefit of both companies. Just look at the aerospace industry.
> Would that be less than the cost of staying with AWS? I think the answer is Yes. The main advantage of Cloud computing I think is the speed to market, not the cost. Excerpt from https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/21/three-years-after-moving-o... "Dropbox still believes it made the right decision and has found innovative ways to keep costs down"
> Is Amazon exploiting their position as Netflix's hosting provider to unfairly compete with them? I completely disagree. Here is one example (Certainly, a simple G search should give enough examples) https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...
> I think the answer is Yes.
So what you're saying is that (1) Netflix is already secretly planning to move away from AWS, in which case your question is moot, or (2) everyone involved in platform decisions at Netflix is an idiot that can't do math.
At different points any one of these may make strategic sense, but as others have highlighted here such moves would consume resources that could be allocated to other areas.
My take would be that increasingly the Netflix business model is really content and production. Disney is the real competitor here. Technology is necessary, but not sufficient.
I think the same too. Curious to confirm the thought process and curious to hear if there any anecdotes
While it's fair to call them competitors, it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison.
So OP actually raises a very good question: why does Netflix use AWS when Walmart does not?
Conversely, if Netflix built out their own cloud, it could have come at the expense of delivering more content, which could risk unseat their position as the leader of streaming space.
> Conversely, if Netflix built out their own cloud Well, they don't have to build their own cloud. They can use other cloud providers still.
Amazon is the company. The company offers AWS and Amazon Prime Video (I am assuming you mean Amazon Prime Video rather than the e-commerce side of the business). Ergo, providing AWS enriches Amazon. Assuming funding within the company is fungible, Netflix is indirectly helping Amazon Prime Video.
OPs question is: Let's assume Netflix takes this as the antecedent- why do they still choose to indirectly enrich Amazon Prime Video, their competitor?