The Video-Industry behaves just like the Music-Industry. They constantly throw dirt at the wall and look for what is sticking to it. If they find something that sticks, they throw further dirt at this point until the whole blob falls down and they start over. The saw what sticks to customers when it comes to price-hikes and now throw everything after this to see how long it will stick. Vote with your wallet.
In all seriousness, streaming could be profitable for these companies if they just didn't layer bullshit on top of bullshit on the backend. Dozens of k8s clusters, hundreds of stupid microservices, and engineering team to manage it all...it's insane. This is BEFORE all the idiotic choices they make greenlighting new content that costs a ton of money.
If they just wanted to make money on streaming, they could without the extra bullshit, and just charged people for sending content across the wire. This is just not what any of these companies are doing anymore, and we're paying for it.
I can't speak to k8s but there are reasons you need clusters to handle absurd amounts of data with high uptime and high networking performance.
The reason the streamers are creating their own content is licensing breakdowns and copyright law. I don't know why everyone thinks they can out Netflix the Netflix streaming service, but they also think they'll make more money trying to do it. It's like Amazon deciding to somehow make their delivery system better than UPS. Or cheaper.
I think it either calls into question the supposed economies of scale and core business competency theories or they're not doing it to save money / make money at all.
I'm not here to shoot down your comment in response, but you are confusing a few different things here. My point was just to demonstrate how the actual cost for streaming from a provider when you throw all the extra junk they do on top of it. You can have very reliable, distributed systems without all that mess, they just choose not to go that route. Selling a user subscription is just the beginning down a rabbit hole of upsells, price hikes, content lures, marketing gimmicks, data capture and sale programs, Ads (for a service you already pay for in most cases)...it's expansive. Each one of those things has a team behind it making decent money.
If they just wanted to stream things they could with much less cost and effort, AND make money doing it. It's been done before. They all just choose to go the route of squeezing their audience for every last ounce of possible monetization they can, which costs a ton of money.
So you are tryimg to tell me that the operating costs of the CDN are the big reason they need money, not the fact they throw billions at crappy content productions? And that the little performance you would gain by stripping k8s would make a difference, especially wrt the huge additional administration effort and lack of automation this would introduce? Nah man, sorry but you are wrong here in many ways.
No, I'm saying that Netflix WAS a streaming service only, and then created a scenario where they constantly need more money and can't support their own business practices by incurring an insane amount of debt by complicating the platform and spending a small country's GDP in creating new content. They WERE making money, and then went off the rails and now need to constantly raise prices.
I'm not sure what you mean about the CDN, but aside from Amazon and Google, none of these streaming services are caching at edge for the actual video libraries. Instead, Netflix specifically has tiered replication of their entire library in various AZs around the world tailored to each regions most popular content. You can see this at work by watching your network traffic hit different endpoints for something like a popular new title versus an old and rarely watched title.
Sounds like you could save them buckets of money by redesigning their whole backend. They'd probably pay you idiot money to do so, in terms of seven figures per year at least for the cost and performance enhancements you seem to think are easily achievable.
You can Google and find better people than myself who say the exact same thing. There are academic papers. This isn't a unique perspective, you're just wildly uninformed.
But good on you for throwing yourself out there to try to be the first in saying something so uninformed and idiotic to get those internet points. They're worth even less than on Reddit here. Good job.