Netflix

Global Video Streaming Platform

220M+

Subscribers

190+

Countries

15%

Global Traffic

1B+

Hours Streamed/Day

Company Overview

Netflix started as a DVD-by-mail service in 1997 and transformed into the world's leading streaming platform. Today, Netflix serves over 220 million subscribers globally, streaming billions of hours of content daily.

The company's technical evolution from a simple DVD rental service to a global streaming platform represents one of the most significant system design transformations in modern technology.

Business Model

Subscription-based revenue model
Original content production and licensing
Global expansion strategy
Personalized recommendation engine

Context

• Global streaming platform serving 190+ countries
• Multi-region architecture with heavy edge caching (Open Connect)
• Personalization & A/B experimentation at massive scale

Patterns & Typical Choices

• API Gateway: rate-limits, auth, request shaping (e.g., Zuul/Envoy)

• Storage: metadata (KV/Doc), sessions (in-memory), search (inverted index), analytics (data lake)

• Messaging: queues vs streams; idempotency; outbox/CDC to avoid dual-writes

• Caching: edge CDN + service caches; stampede protection (locks, jittered TTLs)

• Observability: trace IDs across hops; RED/USE metrics with SLOs

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