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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2048 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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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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