it would just be a convenient nice to have, but indeed add no value over saving time and internet bandwidth

Normally keys get rotated no?

Even if the entire catalogue didn't fit on there, they mostly exist as edge caches , so stuffing the most popular/upcoming things on there and watching the hit rate is probably good enough to reduce most of the needless transit.

That and they had different tiers of hardware I believe.

Maybe not if there are many encodings.

You could fit 13,000 4K movies in 262TB. But Netflix will have versions for different resolutions/output devices pre baked so I reckon (I wouldn't want to gamble to much on this) that a single device wouldn't have everything.

If you look into the deployment guides (.. I was a little bored during lunch, lol. Also high scale tech is cool.) they preload content based on where the device is going to be deployed before shipping them out.

From there they have a "fill" window each day during the ISP's low traffic period where Netflix pushes new content to it.

> Each Open Connect Appliance (OCA) stores a portion of the Netflix catalog, which in general is less than the complete content library for a given region. Popularity changes, new titles that are added to the service, re-encoded movies, and routine software enhancements are all part of the nightly updates, or fill, that each appliance must download to remain current.

-- https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/deployment-guide/

I mean honestly in 2022 their catalogue might fit entirely ( :P ) but yeah looks like it's just a portion, comprised of whatever's popular in the region

For and edge caching node, it doesn't need to. The vast majority of traffic is for a relatively small subset of the catalog that is popular that week/day/hour. Cache misses are directed to more centralized nodes that do have the full catalog (though not necessarily all on one server).