We are thrilled to announce that Zype has received the Bronze Stevie Award from the American Business Awards for Support Department of the Year. At Zype, our customers are our most important asset and at the core of all of our decisions, and our support team is committed to providing expert product knowledge and unparalleled personalized support.

The American Business Awards are the U.S.A.’s premier business awards program. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations – public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small. 

More than 3,800 nominations – a record number - from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration in a wide range of categories. We are honored to be chosen among the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and many other prestigious companies recognized in the American Business Awards. 

Zype's customer-centric approach and the way we prioritize customer feedback has set our business apart and helped us earn a reputation for amazing service. Our video infrastructure is a collaborative effort with our users and we credit some of our best product innovations to this collaboration. 

Thank you to our customers and partners for making this recognition possible. We look forward to continuing to provide the highest level of support and watching our customers succeed!

Zype Wins Third Stevie Award for Customer Service and Support

Zype wins American Business Awards Stevie Award for Support Department of the Year.

Video accounted for over 60% of downstream web traffic in 2019. ISPs have seen downstream video traffic grow, since March 2020, by double digits.  Cisco predicts that video data will hit 82% of internet traffic by 2023. 

Bandwidth is growing globally – particularly with the arrival of mobile 5G – and streaming demand is keeping pace. Television and film are becoming stream-first forms of entertainment. Cord shaving and satellite-dish ditching for FAST (Free Ad-supported Streaming TV) and subscription video services have accelerated over the past year with no dissipation in the foreseeable future. How can content providers guarantee the best user experience irrespective of which CTV (Connected TV), STB (Set-top Box), or mobile device consumers have at their disposal?  

The solution is simple and affordable: adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR). Read on to learn more about harnessing the power of ABR.

Adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) is a method of streaming video over HTTP.  The source content is encoded at multiple bitrates (renditions), which are small segments or chunks of the overall video content.  Segment size can vary anywhere from 2-10 seconds.  The streaming client is alerted to the available renditions by a manifest file - .m3u8 playlist for HLS and MPD (Media Presentation Description) for DASH.  The client requests a segment rendition based on the available bandwidth of the end-user device on a scaling ladder, starting with the lowest bitrate.  As bandwidth increases, a higher bitrate segment will be requested, and conversely, as bandwidth decreases, a lower bitrate segment will be requested.  To the end-user, content plays back smoothly without interruption, and bitrate changes may even go unnoticed. 

Progressive video streaming preceded ABR and is essentially a one-size-fits-all form of internet video delivery. It uses HTTP-based technology via servers to push downloads (i.e., streams) to devices – without optimizing the stream for client capability and bandwidth. The client makes an HTTP request, and an HTTP response comes back from the server.  Playback starts only after several seconds of content is stored in the playback buffer.  Content continues to be fetched by the client as bandwidth allows, and smooth, uninterrupted playback is dependent on bandwidth, allowing buffer to outpace playback.  The end-user could only fast forward through the previously fetched content.

Progressive streaming ignored user bandwidth, processing power, frame rate, and resolution. There is only one version of the video file, at whatever quality it is encoded in.  That video file is simply scaled (stretched or squeezed) to fit the output display. For example, if a video is 1280 x 720, it will be stretched to fill a 1920 x 1080 raster.

How ABR Streaming Solved Progressive Streaming Issues

Adaptive bitrate streaming solved all of these progressive streaming issues. It transcodes video content into different streams. Content providers encode multiple versions of the same video at different bitrates and resolutions, each optimized for other devices’ needs. 

Device players automatically adapt to the current operational conditions with respect to the end-user network speed and display capability. This all happens in real-time, facilitating the optimal end-user experience. 

ABR allows content providers to deliver a better Quality of Experience, which naturally leads to a more satisfied audience for their service. It is ABR that allows live television programming to be streamed concurrently to large-screen televisions and mobile phones – with, hopefully, minimal issues. 

The Difference between Adaptive Bitrate and Multi-Bitrate Streaming

Multi-bitrate video streaming is another standard method of streaming. It allows video distributors to create multiple versions of a video stream tailored to different devices, similar to adaptive bitrate videos. However, multi-bitrate streaming does not respond to a user’s changing playback environment. 

Multi-bitrate puts the onus on consumers to manually select which of the streaming options is the highest or most efficient that their devices can handle. This means the player will continue to attempt to play the file, even though conditions may not be the most ideal for that selection.

The process of ABR streaming begins with the transcoding of an original stream.

Transcoding is a critical step in delivering content that can adapt to fit the screen sizes and internet speed of viewers.  This is a multistep process that begins with a compressed and encoded video file. The first step is to decompress and decode the video file. The next is to manipulate the video file. There are two subcategories of transcoding.

Transrating: The transcoding process by which the bitrate is manipulated without changing the video format. Transrating might also alter a video’s frame rate or resolution. 

Transizing: Altering the resolution or video frame to fit different types of screens. 

The final step is to re-encode and re-compress the new version of the video file created from transrating and transizing. This can be a lossy process that minimally degrades the video quality.  This new file becomes part of a streaming profile.  

Streaming profiles are organized into a profile ladder – ranging from the lowest quality to the highest quality. Many broadcasters use a standardized ladder system – Apple and Netflix proposed several popular ones. These profiles represent the entire array of adaptive bitrate streams that will be served to viewers. 

The power of ABR is to adapt based on multiple playback environment variables. At this point in the process, however, we merely have profiles for a multi-rate stream. 

The streaming profiles are broken down into two- to 10-second video chunks – often referred to as packages. 

The chunks are labeled and organized in a manifest. The player uses the manifest to determine how the video is to be downloaded and rendered.

When streaming commences, the user device provides information to the server about its bitrate, screen resolution, hardware capabilities, player type, and other information. The media server then begins delivering the highest quality video stream the device is capable of displaying. 

What makes ABR powerful is that the device and server continue to communicate. As the server delivers more packages to the device, the device provides updated information about its state. Perhaps the bandwidth suddenly switched from LTE to 5G, for example. The server will see this and seamlessly deliver a profile with a higher bitrate still optimized for the exact screen resolution. 

It is the constant feedback and on-the-fly adapting that lets you deliver high-quality ABR video to numerous device types at the same time. 

Why ABR Streaming and ABR Encoding Provide the Best UX 

ABR streaming and encoding are no longer the exceptions with the online viewing experience – they are expected. 

The advantages of ABR streaming are innumerable, but its power comes from what your customers will soon take for granted: 

Better viewing experience on mobile and connected TV devices

The ABR advantage is that the user experience is so fluid and painless, your subscribers won’t notice the technology at all. 

Your streaming business depends on a satisfactory user experience. You can’t afford to alienate viewers with buffering, low-quality video, slow loading, and bad latency – not when they have innumerable streaming options available to them. 

Adaptive bitrate streaming is inherently technical, but it’s easily implemented with the right tools. 

Zype offers companies and content creators a full-stack suite of video editing and streaming software, including world-class ABR encoding and streaming capabilities. 

Why Adaptive Bitrate Streaming & ABR Encoding Provide the Best UX

How can content providers guarantee the best user experience irrespective of which CTV (Connected TV), STB (Set-top Box), or mobile device consumers have at their disposal? The solution is simple and affordable: adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR).

In the U.S. alone, TV advertisements are a $71 billion industry. But for cable TV, that revenue is shrinking.

Americans are increasingly cutting the cord, leaving traditional ad-supported broadcasts and cable to plummet. Whether this is due to the overwhelming sentiment that TV advertisements are not relevant, or to the convenience offered by OTT services, fewer Americans have cable TV in their homes than ever before.

In response, advertising dollars are increasingly shifting away from cable TV and toward digital streaming to meet customers in their preferred settings – but that’s not the only challenge to overcome in regaining revenue.

Americans still consume an average of four hours of TV per day, but they’re now doing it in an environment where each player device can deliver ad personalization (given the user identification methodologies unique to the web). For broadcasters still using hard-coded advertisements in their streams, they run the risk of showcasing dated or irrelevant ads that need to be replaced.

For broadcasters looking to offer advertisers -- and viewers -- personalized ads using dynamic ad insertion best practices, the broadcast standard SCTE 35 signals are a modern solution to this problem. 

Here’s everything you should know about how OTT content distributors can use the cue tones built for analog broadcasting to power ad-supported linear streams across platforms such as Pluto TV, Samsung TV Plus, The Roku Channel, IMDb TV, Plex, and Xumo. 

SCTE 35 is a standard created by ANSI and the Society of Cable and Telecommunications Engineers that lays out guidelines for inline cue tone insertion in streams. Also referred to as markers, these signals indicate where content distributors could insert or splice content into a stream.

For example, if a local news station received a stream from a national news broadcaster, the stream might be marked in areas where the station could replace national ads with others that were more relevant to the community.

Cue tones originated as a means to signal commands to equipment, particularly when to start or stop. This was especially useful with cartridge tapes, as the tape would otherwise play in a loop. Originally, cue tones occurred as DTMF tones, or subaudible tones that could not be heard by normal listeners. As broadcasting shifted to digital means via IPTV, cue tones likewise became digital. Now, the markers are read by computers and no actual subaudible tone exists.

Applied to QAMP/IP, Title VI/TVE, and live or time-shifted delivery, SCTE 35 is the core signal standard for advertising, programming, and content distribution control. It was originally designed for ad insertion, but the digital nature of SCTE 35 markers brings greater flexibility to their use.

SCTE 104 and SCTE 35 work together to help with personalized ad placement, but many people are still confused about their relationship and differences.

In short: SCTE 35 cues exist within the MPEG transport stream. In contrast, SCTE 104 messages are sent between systems via TCP/IP.

SCTE 104 markers are inserted by an automation or playout system prior to sending the baseband video feed to the inserter. Once the feed reaches the encoder, those markers get translated into compressed stream markers to be transmitted with the content. The compressed markers are what SCTE 35 defines.

Think of it this way: the markers inserted under SCTE 104 are requests for content insertion. The markers inserted by SCTE 35 are what helps to fulfill those requests.

When an SCTE 35 marker appears in the program, it signals to broadcasters where they may splice other content into the feed. Typically, these spaces are predefined in 15-, 30-, or 45-second chunks  (though they don’t have to be). Broadcasters then decide what to do with that slot. Some options include:

Replacing low priority national ads with more relevant local ads

The diagram below illustrates a SCTE-35 embedded programmed HLS stream.

Besides ad insertion, SCTE 35 lends itself well to program segmentation. In program segmentation, content distributors split up content into different chunks for management purposes. The most common and readily visible example of this is chapters in recorded TV shows or movies.

Once segmented like this, a content distributor can add, change, or remove different parts of the program depending on their needs. For example, legal reasons might require a local station to black out a chapter of a movie. 

A content distributor could make a segment of content unavailable for web delivery. Likewise, another chapter might be replaced with a provider ad or local content that’s more relevant. 

These segments are unnoticed by the end viewer but give stations and content distributors significantly more control over the content they show.

OTT has some natural advantages for ad insertion. Specifically:

Unicasting means that each device connects to the server independently. It’s possible to leverage this to deliver more personalized ads because the device can read the SCTE 35 marker and reach out to the server for an ad.

Sequences of fragments are individually decodable – they don’t require the segment before or after it. That simplifies splicing and increases flexibility with how the ads are inserted.

Ad insertion with SCTE 104/35 works with SVOD, TVOD, and AVOD – it’s not server-dependent because the actual marker insertion happens before the server receives profiles and constructs manifests.

Likewise, OTT feeds are able to carry SCTE 35 markers that they receive from the transcoder. In other words, you’ll still handle SCTE 35 markers on the programmer side. 

When profiles get created, the transcoder will need to create segments that align with these markers. However, once compiled into the manifest, you’ll simply determine whether the playback device requests an ad (client-side insertion), or whether to manipulate the manifest itself to insert the ad (server-side insertion).

And since splicing is so simple, testing your ad insertion for live streams becomes a breeze. Any good live streaming platform available out there will have the ability to read markers, let you insert ads, and test beforehand what the final playback will look like.

It doesn’t take a well-funded research study to tell us what we already know: people hate ads. However, the data can support two very important considerations surrounding viewer behavior:

On-demand viewers are more averse to ads: 56% of on-demand viewers say they tend to mute ads on the TV versus 48% of live TV watchers. 54% of on-demand viewers say they don’t trust ads on TV, while only 48% of the live TV watchers share a similar view.

Despite consumer disdain for ads, Americans still tolerate them: 47% of Americans now subscribe to free ad-supported streaming TV services, or “FASTs.”

On one hand, we have on-demand viewers reporting their anti-ad viewing habits. On the other, we have almost 50% of Americans tolerating ads if it means they get access to free TV. Both of these points can lead us to the same conclusion: the better or more targeted the ads, the more engagement and money broadcasters can make off them.

SCTE 35 can help with that. If you have the power to serve up personalized ads to viewers, then SCTE 35 markers make it easy to identify where in the stream you can put them.

Personalized, On-Demand Content Just Became Realistic

With the rise of OTT streaming, content distributors have a new set of tools for easily delivering on-demand content. And SCTE 35 has found new relevance, promising the means to serve up personalized, on-demand ads to the viewer. Say goodbye to irrelevant or hard-coded ads in your OTT stream. Say hello to a new way to insert content and grow your revenue.

If you want to learn more about Zype's video platform and how our monetization solutions can help you leverage technologies like SCTE 35 to send targetable data back to your ad server for pinpoint ad targeting, click here. 

A Complete Guide to SCTE 35 for OTT Ad Insertion [2021 Edition]

Want to deliver targeted, personalized ads? With SCTE 35 personalized ads are a reality in streaming. Learn how to leverage SCTE 35 in this guide.

Live streaming has exploded since the beginning of 2020. It’s now worth an astounding $184.27 billion – up 99 percent from 2019.

There’s little wonder why. Forrester once found that live video content holds viewer attention ten times longer than pre-recorded videos. Live content feels exclusive, and it produces a stronger sense of connection.

However, all of that explosive growth comes with challenges. Notably, live streaming has always suffered from quality and availability challenges. In response, many companies have turned to CDNs for live streaming.

With a CDN, live streaming becomes much more scalable and improves overall stream and playback performance.

With a multi-CDN, the benefits are compounded.

Here is everything you need to know about live streaming CDNs, and what to look for when choosing a multi-CDN vendor.

Live Streaming CDN: What Is Multi-CDN Delivery?

Ever wondered why it only takes a second to stream a video hosted on a website on the opposite side of the world?

It’s because that content provider is using a content delivery network, or CDN.

A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers and services distributed across a wide geographic area to accelerate the rate at which your audience can access your content. Rather than forcing your computer to talk to a server that’s on the other side of the world, you access a “cache server” or “edge node” that’s located much nearer to you. That edge node swaps content assets between other nearby nodes, as well as with the origin server. The result for customers is faster delivery of content and services.

For enterprise customers and large broadcasters, however, a single CDN can be overloaded. This is especially true for live streaming with large audiences. Likewise, smaller companies may find a single CDN inadequate if they wish to operate globally.

In such instances, a multi-CDN becomes necessary.

A multi-CDN involves a combination of several CDNs – usually (but not always) from different providers. Rather than having a single origin server where the content is housed, a multi-CDN leverages several origin servers, each with its own legion of edge nodes in nearby regions. Requests for content are simply routed to the most appropriate CDN to ensure speed and accessibility.

However, if that sounds like a lot of infrastructure, that’s because it is. Multi-CDNs are often expensive to set up, but with the rise of cloud computing, they don’t have to be.

Cloud Computing Makes Multi-CDNs Accessible

Cloud computing has made multi-CDNs much more accessible to non-enterprise customers. Instead of requiring a whole assortment of hardware, a single platform ingests your content and distributes it to origin servers located globally that were already built by the company.

It’s the buy it versus build it argument.

Building your own video infrastructure gives you more control, but it’s slower and more expensive. In contrast, cloud-supported multi-CDNs deliver reliable, fast, high-performing delivery on a global scale – with a faster time to market and guaranteed reliability.

That’s great for both smaller businesses and larger companies that need additional CDN support only some of the time – such as for traffic offloading during live events.

A multi-CDN has many benefits, but live streaming is where they become more noticeable.

If you want to deliver a top-notch viewer experience, a multi-CDN becomes more essential the bigger and more spread out your audience becomes. That’s because it:

·   Optimizes costs. A multi-CDN using the cloud has built-in features for reserving resources, managing consumption, plus keeping infrastructure lean and efficient.

·   Improves overall performance. Network availability and latency issues are all but eliminated. Viewers access content faster, with less lag and fewer hiccups.

·   Powers the scaling of products or services. Scaling with a traditional CDN is difficult. In contrast, a cloud multi-CDN can do it automatically according to need in either direction.

·   Enhances service resiliency. If one CDN goes down for any reason, another stands ready to take its place.

·   Increases geographic distribution. Reach your fans no matter where they’re located and give them the same viewing experience as those closest to you.

·   Solves network congestion. A multi-CDN prevents origin servers from becoming overwhelmed and eliminates the risks associated with a DDoS.

Questions to Ask When Choosing a Multi-CDN Vendor

As CDNs become commoditized, plenty of vendors have sprung up to meet the need. According to Deloitte, the global CDN market was worth $14 billion in 2020, growing at an annual rate of 16 percent.

CDNs have played an essential role in the explosive growth of the internet and using one is a smart move for companies seeking to expand their content’s reach. However, not all multi-CDN vendors offer the same thing. Here are a few things to ask potential vendors when shopping for a CDN for live streaming:

·   What traffic management options are there? How does your infrastructure support traffic offload to protect my origin servers?

·   How does your service provide observability into the platform? Can I proactively identify when something might go wrong and fix it to prevent a disruption in streaming?

·   How many CDNs are used? How do you ensure consistency and availability during live events?

·   What processes do you have in place to ensure resiliency and continuous service when one or more CDN is down?

·   How scalable is your platform? Will it be able to handle a surge in audience traffic?

·   What security measures do you have in place? Will my live stream be secure from DDoS attacks?

·   How does your infrastructure handle quality challenges, particularly those at the edge? Do you use peer2peer CDNs?

A Better Video Experience For Your Viewers

A CDN can make sure your content stays available, secure, and – most importantly – truly live. By routing traffic to edge nodes, a CDN keeps traffic dispersed and away from your origin server. That means no more network congestion, streaming lag, and quality issues that can drive away viewers.

Multi-CDNs are the way forward for live streaming and thanks to the cloud, it's easier than ever for companies to embrace a Multi-CDN strategy in pursuit of the best possible viewer experience.

Looking to give your customers a better video experience?

With Zype’s Content Delivery you can get enterprise-level CDN support on a global scale. Our multi-CDN approach covers VOD, Live, and Linear video content delivery and  provides amazing geographic coverage across thousands of POPs. It is engineered to be resilient and scalable, so you can stream your video to wherever your customer is, on whatever device they choose.

Live Streaming CDN: Why a Multi-CDN Strategy is Key to Viewer Experience

Building software teams that produce amazing outcomes is hard. There is plenty of competition, many different areas of expertise, and in this “remote-first” world we now live in, there are few opportunities to meet someone face to face, whiteboard or socialize with them, and get a sense of their personality and whether they would be a good fit for your team. 

At Zype, we know a thing or two about developers and engineers. We've hired our own fair share of super talented ones, plus we build tools for them to use everyday. So here are some tips for executives and management teams that want to build a culture of awesome hiring in engineering:

As we wrote back in 2018, I still believe that two of the most important qualities of a software engineer are:

However, when committing yourself or your People Ops team or Engineering leadership to hiring, there is more to be done to prepare, execute, and ensure long term success for your company, your management, and the team member.  

It is so important to discuss values early in the hiring process. From the job description, through the content of every interview, you should make sure your hiring team knows that values matter, especially when hiring highly skilled employees like engineers.  Ultimately, you are doing the candidate a big favor by focusing on values. If they are aligned, it will likely be a great relationship. If they are not, they will likely not proceed in your process (either they’ll opt-out or you will). Focusing on values upfront saves you and potential candidates so much time and energy in the long run.

For example, one of Zype’s core values is Courage. We might ask in an interview, “Did you ever have a situation in which you knew that the software you were shipping was going to be substantially late, and there were many other team members and customers depending on its delivery?  How did you deal with that? Can you tell me a real story where that happened in your career?”

The answers to this sort of question - the theoretical and the actual real story - will tell you so much about how the individual aligns with your values.  No wrong answers - just insight.  

Engineers love technology. Your engineering team probably has many amazing acronyms and codewords - SQL, API, Scrum, Terraform, JQuery etc - that they are super proud to be experts in.  That said, managers need to look beyond the acronyms and into the aptitude.  

Is this engineer dogmatic or open to new technologies?

Is there corollary experience that relates to our needs that we can coach up on?  Maybe someone has Oracle experience, but not PostgresQL. Is that okay? Probably.

More importantly, is he/she an amazing problem solver? We make sure to ask about problem-solving in our interviews and dig in for stories about real challenges candidates have faced and overcome in their careers.

Finding a candidate with experience that exactly matches your current team and technologies, is incredible, but unlikely, so it’s important to get a sense of whether or not this person is eager and willing to learn and adapt. 

If you don’t look like a company that has an awesome engineering culture (even if you do), you’ll miss out on so many great opportunities to work with talented engineers. 

Does your team publish anything in open source communities or in Github (publicly)?

Are you talking about engineering at your company outside of your own four walls?

Is your company participating in any industry forums that have engineering communities? If not, give your engineers the tools and support to show off their work and engage in these community discussions. This type of organic discovery is priceless when it comes to finding new talent. 

Once you have a candidate, are they meeting other great engineers at your company to give them a sense of “home” that they can buy into? 

Lastly, but possibly the most important: are you asking everyone you speak with - “can you recommend a great engineer?” I’m sure a large percentage of your contacts probably know someone that is looking for a new challenge. Just ask.

Finding and hiring software engineers and developers is difficult, but there’s no need to over complicate the process. If you lead with company values, search for aptitude, and build an engineer friendly brand that is welcoming to new team members, you will find awesome individuals to join your company. 

Bonus tip: if you haven’t already, ask your own engineers--why did they join your company? How did they find you? What about the product or team attracted them? No one knows better than your own people, so be sure to tap into these resources as well. 

How to Hire Awesome Software Engineers and Developers

Zype's CTO's take on how to hire awesome software developers and software engineers for your team

Netflix serves over 6 billion hours of content per month, globally, to nearly every country in the world.

Building a system that can scale to that volume of customers while delivering high-definition video with zero lag requires significant engineering effort. So let’s  dive deep into Netflix's technology stack and cloud infrastructure to examine what tools, processes, and architecture they use to deliver their high-quality content to viewers around the world.

Before the era of "Netflix and chill," remember when Netflix physically delivered mail-order DVDs to your doorstep?

The company racked and stacked physical servers in on-premise data centers that they owned. These data centers housed databases and applications Netflix used to track customers, maintain inventory, and store customer billing information.

By the time broadband became common and everyone owned a smartphone, Netflix needed to deliver videos to computers, internet-connected TVs, and mobile phones in order to evolve.  This meant moving away from a traditional data center and harnessing the power of the public cloud.

In 2008, Netflix started migrating its on-premise servers and applications into Amazon Web Services (AWS) after experiencing an on-premise data center outage that stopped the business for three days. Startled by the lack of resiliency, they were able to move 100% of all assets into the cloud over seven years and remain one of the pioneers of cloud computing.  

After partnering with AWS, it found that operating costs had gone down and their price per stream was a fraction of the cost. From there, Netflix passed those savings on to its customers. 

Cost reduction was not the main reason we decided to move to the cloud. However, our cloud costs per streaming started ending up being a fraction of those in the data center -- a welcome side benefit.
Netflix blog

By utilizing cloud services through the AWS architecture, Netflix had the flexibility of adjusting scale according to the services used and was (and still are) able to provide these services at a monthly charge that customers felt was reasonable.

In 2000, Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix for $50 million. When the deal fell through, it turned out to be the best thing to happen to Netflix. Over the next 17 years, Netflix had tremendous growth that took its market cap to over $242 billion. Part of this growth can be attributed to its migration to a refined cloud architecture.

When AWS teamed up with Netflix to grow its streaming service and do away with on-premise data centers, the focus shifted to engineering efforts and advancing streaming service capabilities within the Netflix AWS architecture.

However, while Netflix found a solution to scaling, it still needed to find solutions for bandwidth and lag-free video streaming. In the early days of the web, the bandwidth required for video streaming was challenging to overcome when developing these platforms. AWS had the solution that Netflix engineers were looking for, and it came in the shape of a cloud.

We have this insight because Netflix is prominent in the cloud community for sharing their knowledge during the migration to the cloud, as seen on their blog:

We rely on the cloud for all of our scalable computing and storage needs — our business logic, distributed databases and big data processing/analytics, recommendations, transcoding, and hundreds of other functions that make up the Netflix application.
-Yury Izrailevsky, Stevan Vlaovic and Ruslan Meshenberg of Netflix

Taking a peek into their architecture, Netflix maintains hundreds of AWS accounts that isolate the various parts of their business, from Subscriptions to Content Delivery to Personalized Recommendations.

Netflix can quickly develop features because all of its engineers are empowered to launch resources in their appropriate accounts without getting approvals from various parts of the company. By utilizing AWS Organizations and Account Units, Netflix can organize their engineering teams' applications, providing engineers autonomy and speed.

Within these AWS accounts, engineers use a myriad of technologies to deliver high-fidelity video streaming.

Let's start with how Netflix can serve videos. All content is stored in object storage like Amazon S3 and cached using AWS CloudFront. This enables Netflix to distribute video content all around the world with low latency speeds.

Videos need to be ultimately transcoded into various formats for optimal viewing based on the device used for watching. Connected TV and mobile video is transcoded differently from desktop videos because of the different screen sizes, resolution, and network availability.

Take, for example streaming from a phone. You will go in and out of signal depending on where you live, and in order to continuously deliver video, the service needs to adjust and buffer so you dynamically have a consistent viewing experience. This transcoding is called H.264, and Netflix can do this by harnessing the power of AWS Elastic Transcoder, which takes videos and formats them appropriately.

Video streaming, however, is only a small part of the picture.

Customers have a smorgasbord of choices when watching videos on Netflix. To keep customer engagement and retention high, Netflix employs a personalization algorithm to help uncover videos that a customer may be interested in based on their previous viewing history. This means that all interactions when watching a video must be recorded.

Netflix does this by utilizing data streaming technologies like Kafka and storing data in NoSQL databases like DynamoDB – a key-value and document database achieving single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. It's a wholly managed, multi-region, multi-active, robust database with fixed security that can handle over 10 trillion requests per day. During peak viewing, this tech stack can support over 20 million requests per second.

Netflix engineers can then write applications deployed on AWS EC2 or AWS Lambda that accesses this data to compute personalized videos to show. For this reason, many of the fastest-growing companies such as Airbnb, Lyft, and Redfin, also industry-leaders such as Capital One, Samsung, and Toyota, depend on the scale and execution of DynamoDB to maintain critical workloads.

In all areas, Netflix's tech stack wins out above its competition. J.D. Power and Associates published a survey that found Netflix customers reported fewer service problems than other popular streaming services. 

By eliminating its need for a large data center of its own, which would require costly upgrades over time, Netflix had a fluid infrastructure that was easy to adjust as needed for more beneficial uses of data resources. 

However, not all data is stored in a database and some is better suited to be stored on disks. Netflix is known to employ Hadoop to aggregate various data types and move them into data warehouses or other databases across the company. Netflix has data science teams that sift through this data to conduct business analytics, like determining how many customers are watching a specific movie or how likely someone will unsubscribe from the service.

While it is impossible to analyze every part of Netflix's business, the above describes a few major components for delivering online video.

To enable these features, developers need to quickly deploy their code, which is tested and can be rolled back if a bug is introduced. This is no easy feat, and Netflix has developed a very sophisticated Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline for providing a mechanism to deploy cloud applications.

Netflix invented and open-sourced their tool, called Spinnaker, which allows developers to make small changes, roll them out with automated tests, and then get them live to a small subset of users. When the confidence level that a bug has not been introduced increases, the changes then automatically rolled out globally over time.

One of the major discussion points when moving to the cloud is security and Netflix has publicly documented its security practices. It locks content by region, so a movie that the company only has rights to in The United States, for example, does not make its way to other regions. Netflix does this by employing DRM solutions in the cloud.

Internally, Netflix uses AWS IAM to lock permissions for employees and applications with the least permission privilege. Even if a user becomes compromised, the damage they can do is minimal, as they would not have access to the entire set of assets in the cloud.

Being in the cloud also means using SaaS products internally to improve the productivity of the workforce. Netflix uses Jira software for managing engineering tasks and Confluence for documentation requirements.

With a large workforce, managing passwords is difficult, so Netflix employs single-sign-on technologies like OneLogin to allow access to various SaaS products without remembering hundreds of different passwords. SaaS tools are constantly changing, and knowing Netflix, they will be adapting to be more efficient.

The Netflix tech stack incorporates multiple programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, Python, Kotlin, and Swift. Netflix's scalability and security are the results of its use of Python. Kotlin comes in handy with other programming languages by granting necessary tooling support. 

Python is one of the world's fastest-growing programming languages and is used for everything from operations management/analysis to networking and security. Netflix utilizes Python throughout the entire content lifecycle. Netflix’s  OTT architecture also supports Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for innovations like data-economical encoding and user personalization – giving each user a unique experience and ensuring the content presented to them is personalized to their preferences.

The Netflix tech stack also contains fully comprehensive libraries that improve user experience (UX) and acts as a highlight for the development process. Netflix secures its user-friendly interfaces with React (also known as Reactjs/React.js/ReactJS), the JavaScript UI library, and applies NodeJS as a framework and WinJS to aid in Windows applications development.

The user never sees the technology stack that goes into streaming their favorite content, but the Netflix engineers are constantly working to improve its platform. For this reason, Netflix has been able to remain the global leader in streaming video.

In fact, Netflix is so synonymous with streaming that the word “Netflix” has become a verb in our daily vernacular.

Netflix has worked continuously to improve video quality for its members worldwide. One significant breakthrough in its continuous attempts to improve UX has been what Netflix calls its Per-title Encode Optimization. Introduced in December 2016, Per-Title Encode Optimization introduced the idea of customizing encoding based on the complexity for better resolution and bitrate selection for each video sequence. 

This coding language provides a significant improvement over previously framed resolution and bitrate generation. It does this by taking into account the characteristics of video and optimizing coding performance by selecting parameters. 

Another remarkable milestone has been Per-Chunk Encode Optimization as part of the Mobile Encodes for Downloads initiative - the concept of equalizing rate-distortion slopes that work and provide notable enhancements. 

GitHub is another application Netflix uses for code collaboration and version control. They also use LogicMonitor for execution monitoring and Apteligent (previously known as Crittercism) for mobile error monitoring.

The ambitious team at Netflix is the perfect example of how a company can keep pace with technological advances while still remaining core to its primary deliverable. For consumers, the technology powering the backend is unknown, but the amount of streaming it deploys showcases that they have a winning service that continues to achieve remarkable growth.

Building Netflix's Backend… The Easier Way

Developing video on demand requires a large engineering staff, hundreds of millions of dollars in cloud computing (if you are going to operate at a Netflix scale), and a decoupled architecture that allows applications to scale so that they are resilient in the face of performance issues and outages.

For most companies, building this infrastructure is either too expensive, too time-consuming, too resource-intensive, or too risky. For many, emulating the Netflix tech stack is like a pipe dream; even if you know how they have built things out, it doesn’t make it easy to imitate.

This is why Zype was created. We’ve developed a  powerful suite of products that allows you to manage your video across every channel from a single platform with all the built-in tools you need to build or augment your existing OTT video tech stack. From VideoMeta CMS, Video CRM, encoding, playout, and content delivery tools, Zype leads the way for companies to use pre-existing technologies to build and scale their video infrastructure. 

Zype can help offload many of the heavy lifting operations required to deliver OTT video. I encourage you to check us out.

Netflix Tech Stack: Breaking Down Netflix's OTT Architecture

We dive into Netflix's technology stack to examine what tools and architecture they use to deliver their high-quality content streaming services.

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