I thought the same thing 10 years ago when I worked there. At the time management was not interested in losing focus on doing anything other than streaming movies to customers.

But it should be noted that the FreeBSD Openconnect boxes are highly optimized to Netflix's use case. Which is serving a predefined set of content that has been pre-rendered. Youtube and its ilk are a completely different use case.

The Netflix cache is so optimized for serving Netflix movies that for many years we still used Akamai for all of our other CDN needs, but it looks like they may have finally moved that to Netflix's own CDN now.

Wow, that is actually a really interesting idea in the context of developing a YouTube competitor. Delivery & bandwidth are a really high barrier to entry, and piggy-backing off of Netflix's existing network could really lower those costs. I agree the "providing services to your direct competition" is probably a stumbling block, and likely Netflix has other irons in the fire. But anyway it's a cool idea to think about.

It works with such high efficiency because we know how to place content in advance, and the catalog is relatively small. Trying to serve 800Gbps of YouTube content would be a nightmare.