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To me, Netflix streaming is like some alien technology from the future. I live in a rural area with terrible broadband (miniscule monthly cap). However, I have an unlimited data plan for my phone and with a composite video cable I can plug my phone into the television and stream movies from the Netflix app. We've never had cable TV, and with Netlix and iTunes there's no point. Even over 3G, we get surprisingly good video quality.

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If you're interested in how the sausage is made, I believe Netflix uses Microsoft's Smooth Streaming[1] to accomplish that (I know they use it for the in-browser client, but am not 100% positive about the native mobile apps). Smooth streaming is an under-appreciated tool, IMO. Given its power, you might reasonably assume it would be complex and expensive to set up, but it's a free extension to IIS if you have any recent edition of Windows Server and is amazingly simple to get up and running with your own video.

[1] http://www.iis.net/media

Smooth Streaming is certainly a great piece of technology, and thanks to the guys at Code Shop, it now works on several devices and using nginx, Apache and lighttpd: http://smoothstreaming.code-shop.com/trac

Netflix streaming is like the bittorrent protocol (lots of participant hosts and lots of chunked fetches). See this: http://labs.mudynamics.com/2011/04/07/mommy-netflix-is-eatin...

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