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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2057 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 2026

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You can store a couple of thousand films on even a small disk array, the first 5-10 minutes of tens of thousands on another and then you have a few minutes to load the remaining film to a server cache for those rarely accessed titles.

Have you seen the storage requirements for 2160p content? They’re enormous. Maybe if you’re talking about 480p, I could see that. Because if the former held up, then I ‘clearly’ built my stack the wrong way; lmao. And I know this stuff fairly well.

If I was talking about 480p content, I'd have 10x'd the number of films. And yes, I did do the math (hell, back in my university days I implemented from scratch all the major parts of a video codec for an image processing course and then worked for a number of years on a video compositing platform so this ain't exactly my first rodeo).

The number of films that even have a 2160p digital transfer is limited and this isn't about archival quality copies but streaming for actual viewers, not for a few nerds who compare films purely based on specs. You don't need ridiculously high bitrates for tens of thousands of films because no profitable customer segment actually expects that nor can the vast majority of customers even stream reliably at such speeds. 99% of paying customers won't care if a film is available in "only" 15-20 Mbps when encoded with a decent modern codec (*) with proper options (and not the PSNR optimized crap that was popular for so long in "professional" encoders). They particularly won't care if that's the only way to watch the film at all.

I’m not doubting your expertise in this area necessarily, but I’m completely unable to square the math away on this one. How are you conceptualizing the storage requirements at home for the average user? Because I’m imagining the 15GB-20GB’s on a single file will absolutely murder the allotted bandwidth of the average consumer’s ISP data cap, never mind the at home storage requirements for the user. Say my storage cap was 8TB but even then it’s not a clean slate entirely. How in the world does one get as much as you’re saying on the high end of the spectrum with what I just quoted to you? And that’s at the mega/ultra tail end of a consumer that is going out of their way to future proof their setup. The overwhelming mass of people aren’t doing that.

The home user of course doesn't have to store any of the films, only the streaming service (eg. Netflix) needs to do that. The number of different films in the catalogue only affect the service's storage costs and those are really quite modest. Even a high end consumer level 8x4 TB drive NAS is enough for 2000 movies at 15 Mbps average bitrate (the peak bitrate for action sequences can be much higher and is limited by the maximum network speed), so any halfway decent datacenter can easily handle an order of magnitude more (particularly as the streaming servers can use local caching to service probably 90% of the end user requests).

The discussion was afterall about the rental catalogue size, not about how many films a customer could watch per month (which is affected by bandwidth and licensing but not by amount of storage).

Netflix provides the content through the CDN intermediaries on the backend, but I’m specifically talking about consumer storage requirements. Some people may not want long-term storage. I do. That’s specifically what I’m saying. If you just stick with the business side of things, then sure the consumer is only stuck with the bandwidth issue. Netflix as a content provider will have no issue hosting it, their primary issue is data transmission and network uptime.

There's nothing (apart from money) that stops you from just buying thousands of Blu-Rays right now. Or if you're partial to parrots and eye patches, you can get that 8x4 TB NAS setup and store 2000 full length feature films there. The solutions are already available on consumer side for those rare people who want to do it.

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