Fun Facts: Despite DRM, Netflix Is Built On FreeBSD

Dec 5

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Who knew?  For all the complaining  us Unix and Linux users give closed proprietary software at times, especially heavy handed DRM solutions, it is admirable that some of theme still thank us in other ways.  Netflix is one of those companies, who obviously had to come up with a solid DRM solution to appease the movie industry, but still knows its roots.

At the core of the netflix software stack, is the FreeBSD 9.0 Operating System.   Anyone who knows the world of servers and their Unix/Linux roots, will tell you the stability of BSD when it comes to what powers the net.  Sure, a lot of Linux users are so sucked into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and similar offerings, but the BSD clan still deserves a lot of praise.

Within this core, lies the nginx web server, proven to be a highly scalable and well performing beast, as see by how well Netflix content is served up.  The audio portion of the stream is delivered over the HTTP Protocol.  With Netflix and Youtube literally consuming half of all Web traffic in North America, one has to wonder what routing methods they are implementing to handle all the gobs of data.  Thanks to the power of the BIRD routing daemon, powerful dynamic IP routing makes that possible.  Information is gathered through the BGP routing protocol.

So there you have it.  Way to go Netflix.  For all the grief you cause us as users, I am very glad to see there is some good in the perceived evil of proprietary software and DRM.

About professorkaos64

www.libregeek.org

Posted on 20131205, in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 7 Comments.

  1. K | 20131208 at 08:43

    You seem to lack reading comprehension. Netflix AND Youtube consume half of the traffic and only in USA and Canada (that is: North America), which are not, in fact, whole Internet.

    That’s not “literally”.

    Reply
    • professorkaos64 | 20131208 at 12:49

      I will correct it then. Hostility is not needed here. Next time, please point out the error, and it will be promptly corrected.

      Thanks for stopping by.

      Reply
      • K | 20131208 at 15:06

        Hostility? Was not really intended. It was the statement of the fact. And you still didn’t get it right. The tagline of linked article says: “Netflix and YouTube together make up half of peak Internet traffic in North America”.

        So, you should have written “With Netlix, along with Youtube literally consuming half of all Web trafifc in North America…”

        Cheers! 😉

      • professorkaos64 | 20131208 at 15:37

        Doh! Im sorry man, will correct it. I read things wrong. Cheers man, no bad feelings.

  2. itsjoelwood | 20131209 at 21:37

    I’ve just wrote a blog on Netflix, have a look and see if you agree! Thanks.

    http://itsjoelwood.wordpress.com/blog/

    Reply

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