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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

I was talking with a Netflix product manager a few years ago and, IIUC, he said Netflix re-encodes their entire catalog monthly to take advantage of new encoder optimizations. Disk is cheap. They want to optimize network transfers to both save money and improve user experience.

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Netflix has about 36,000 hours of content. On Youtube that much content is uploaded every 1 hour and 20 minutes! Or to put it another way, Netflix re-encodes every month what YouTube encodes in just over an hour.

Your numbers are off. Netflix has more than 36.000 hours of content.

Care to cite a source?

Back-of-the-envelope calculation: a slacker suffering from insomnia watching 5 streams of Netflix at once × 20 hours/day × 365 days non-stop would otherwise watch the whole catalog in less than a year.

Convinced?

Not really.

If we unpack your calculation to slightly more typical human behaviour: Watching 1 stream × 10 hours/day × 365 days non-stop, one person would need 10 years to watch the whole catalog.

Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

You didn't get the core idea of my calculation: to show that Netflix has times of magnitude more than just 36k hours of content.

I don't know the reliability of these sources, but according to one article[1], as of 1 year ago, US Netflix had ~5.8K titles, totaling 36K hours of content. Another more recent source[2] claims that worldwide, Netflix has ~15K titles, so assuming the same distribution of runtimes, it would be closer to 93K hours of content. So, while you're correct, it's still the same order of magnitude.

sources:

[1] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/how-long-would-it-take...

[2] https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/netflix-statist...

FWIW, that conversation about Netflix re-encoding their catalog monthly was from about seven years ago! Their process has surely changed since then. :)

Also, IIUC, they re-encoded about once a month, but the re-encoding didn't necessarily take one month of compute time.

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