Pornhub serves more diverse data across the world with a much simpler pipeline. They are the ones who should be emulated. Netflix needs a bit of housecleaning to get rid of this faction in the company.
I've seen streaming services serving half a million HD video users a day running on 7 servers, 2 of them being cheap vps.
Paramount looks like Youtube and uses twice as much bandwidth, that is almost impressively bad.
They're often first to come to market, aren't intimidated to try new things, resist being bound by incumbents or gagged by censors and are generally wide open to grasping the full thro ... that's enough now.
not all "HD" is made equal. bitrate is a major component of the perceived video quality. some experienced it first hand when youtube premium started pushing higher bitrate version for 1080p (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34918698).
(disney+) hotstar is an indian streaming service which recently handled more than 50M+ concurrent viewers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344265) for a live sports event. but if you actually watch the stream, it is of a very poor quality.
long story short: hub pushes for bitrate/quality much lower than netflix needs to in order to satisfy its paying customers, especially when they discriminate based on how much one pays.
but i wonder how much it would help with non-cpu scenarios when we need to do transcoding for upcoming codecs which might benefit from using hardware accelerators.