Netflix picks fight with internet exchange industry The internet exchange industry is ripping customers off, charging too much for features people don't need, and spending millions on staff salaries, unnecessary marketing and social events. That's according to the vice president of network strategy and architecture for Netflix, David Temkin, who created a stir at a meeting of …
Pot meet kettle
How much are Netflix wasting in VPN blocking? I'm not even referring to region shifting here. They can at least blame rights holders on that one. Why can't I, an Aussie, with a service paid for on an Australian credit card stream the Australian Netflix library whilst connected to an Australian VPN gateway.
I get the choice of my browsing being slurped by every man and his local library debt recovery department secured by a bunch of muppets who couldn't organise a pissup in a brewery, or watching Netflix, or saying stuff this, it is to hard to buy content safely and otherwise acquire it.
So do you think that Temkin is being altruistic here? Or is he complaining about how some not for profit is costing him another 5c per subscriber that he would prefer on his bottom line...
Can these organisations be more efficiently run? Probably, I'm yet to see any organisation without some form of waste, but your wallet doesn't care whether the money in it came from an extra sale or a reduced overhead. Their VPN block is both an overhead to maintain and a real customer pain point as paying customers hey caught up in the collateral. If you want a bigger bottom line, stop making your customers choose between privacy and your product.
I am sure Netflix would much rather not spend the extra money on the VPN! Why would they want to limit content, I am sure if they had their way everyone would be able to access everything, making it attract more people = more money. Instead the content providers are saying you can't show it in X,Y & Z countries.
Yes it is annoying (I was part way through Suits using an American VPN), but I can hardly begrudge Netflix for it.
You are confusing VPN with region shifting. Netflix know who I am. They require me to authenticate. They have my credit card number and would be able to determine its country of issue. They have my mobile phone number and could validate with 2FA. I am not asking them to let me watch the US library.
Unless you travel to America and use a computer when they can only show you the US library. It is location specific, not users registered location.
For what it is worth I do agree that I would rather be able to use a VPN to the country I am registered in. I used to have my router configured to a VPN in London (being UK based) but had to remove that after the restriction came into play.
Content rights are bought for geographic regions, not for people, and it is typically very complex. E.g. rights for the same sports event may be sold to different entities for particular cities, states or parts of states, countries, original game vs. replays, etc. All controlled by the content owner. After making the best deal they can the new rights holder has to figure out technically how to meet the letter of the contract.
Not Netflix's fault.
Sounds like the sour grapes of someone who wants to slash his firms costs and has run out of ideas. These IXP's exist because we need them. It's like saying we should slash the cost of toilet roll because everyone needs it. When in fact competition does the job just fine and I'm sure it's not beyond the wit of the industry to provide that, if they really think the incumbents are taking the piss. As the prices they charge have actually fallen over time it seems to me they're aware that could happen too.
It's a none issue brought up by someone wishing they'd thought of a better way to make money. I'm sure he would love someone to come and pick apart what his private business spends money on.
In the US a significant number of health care providers are not-for-profit corporations. Even so health care is very expensive. What happens is that being required to not make a profit doesn't contradict with paying excessive salaries, in fact the bigger the payout, the less likely the organization is going to make a profit.
The Netflix guy may or may not have a point, it depends on where those costs are going. If the IPX turns out to be a grabfest for insiders then there may be some room for cost reduction.
I mean DRM is rather expensive. For Pay-TV stations that's usually in the range of several dollars a month per user. Since it's trivial to find out users which just subscribe to the service for a month and then just download _everything_, there is no real need for DRM. The business model of Netflix would still work, just like the business model of television works fine without DRM. In the 1990s Pay-TV stations even introduced their own line of VHS-tapes.
Waste is just a fact of life in any larger organization. You will always find pointless things companies do. If you are lucky they aren't bad for the society at large, if you are they are destroying it.
I don't think you understand why companies like Netflix use DRM. It isn't all about them protecting their own business, its about the copyright licensors requiring it. Netflix are a consumer of the content provided to them by the studios that make it. Those studios require DRM regardless of the format the content is sold in. DVD? DRM. BluRay? DRM. Streaming? DRM. Sky TV? DRM.
Well but doesn't Netflix use DRM on their _own_ productions? I mean Apple also claimed they needed DRM with iTunes... until they released some songs without DRM which then outsold the rest.
Netflix could use their market position to move the market out of DRM, but they refuse to do so. Faced with the option of either loosing a big part of their market, or ditching DRM, I'm not sure if they would continue to require DRM.
The least Netflix could do is to complain about DRM like they complain about so many other things. Instead they drive the W3C into adopting DRM into the browser, spreading DRM even more.
LINX's fees are public and fixed, which I suspect is one part of his annoyance, since unlike other IXP's there is no scope for negotiation as with a profit making company:-
https://www.linx.net/products-services/service-fees-1
His solution, which is clearly got some self-interest, is that they could reduce their costs by utilising lower cost hardware like Arista. The current Extreme LAN will likely migrate to Arista over the next year, but the primary Juniper LAN is liable to stay where it is, hardware wise, not least since it's a massive emulated ring that uses VPLS.
Targets that *could* deliver some savings would be exchanges that LINX runs outside of London and Manchester: Edinburgh has never taken off, and LINX NOVA in Virginia seems a bit pointless in retrospect. Bear in mind the capex for all but the latter is very small since they mostly used equipment salvaged from the old London Foundry LAN, but the OPEX is there for the taking. However, it's really small change in the budget as a whole: the main cost is Juniper hardware.
LINX does act as a clearing house for the UK internet industry, but these costs are mainly covered by the sponsorship of meetings by vendors. Those expensive restaurant dinners are being covered out of other company sales budgets :-)
When I saw that figure and that conclusion, I initially thought the same and wondered if there was a zero missing. Then I spotted the words "board members". He's saying, therefore, that they do no other work for the company than sit on board meetings, and that they are getting that $22K for not many hours at all.
It seems a strange argument from Netflix, the majority of their traffic doesn't even pass through the IXPs. Any ISP who has a decent number of Netflix users will be using a Netflix CDN appliance inside their network. You might argue that this is necessary because of the limitations of the IXP system, but in reality for any larger ISP most of their traffic is through private peering to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and the various CDN providers. Public internet exchanges are just there for the sizeable minority of more unusual routes.
https://openconnect.itp.netflix.com/deliveryOptions/
$22k in to GBP for LINX is about the same as £15k .
£15k for senior board members does not sound like a lot, assuming that they being on the board are over 25 so the minimum wage for them would be £7.20 per hour, that means at that rate they would need to work roughly 40 hours a week to make £15k.
But wait they don’t work full time hours, you are quite right they don't won't. Put it this way would you personally be a board member at a senior and critical level and work for anything even near UK minimum wage? Hell no, hell I don't have a roll at that level but my hourly rate means Id not even have to work 1 full day a week to get 15k.
I'm not saying these there are not issues but I don't think the wage for senior level staff is actually that far-fetched. Especially when we don't know just how much work outside of those meetings they have to do.
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