Assuming the files are encrypted anyway for DRM reasons: why should static content like movies be TLSed? I know I know, "TLS all the things", but it sounds like a high cost at Netflix scale.

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keane an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I would have thought this would have originally been driven by wanting to prevent a browser mixed content warning as ~15% of Netflix viewing happens in browsers (and the browser warnings switched to blocking around 2019).

@drewg123 starts discussing this section at 4:21 in the presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzfADu1qyAM&t=261 ("we had this mandate that we had to start encrypting communications between our servers and our clients")

Netflix announced the change in 2016, citing viewer privacy from eavesdropping: https://netflixtechblog.com/protecting-netflix-viewing-priva...

However, I wonder if the mandate was led by Apple. It looks like it was 2015 (at iOS 9.0 / macOS 10.11) that Apple began requiring that network connections made by apps use TLS. While exceptions are allowed, they are discouraged and require a justification for App Store review: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/preventin...

	▲	andrewf 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Browser behavior like mixed content warnings (and a clear slide towards discouraging all non-HTTPS traffic) was the impetus for us at Twitch to TLS all our video in the mid-2010s. Mixed content delivery on a website would, I think, also fall below the bar for doing certain kinds of commerce, and ejecting people from your webapp to a separate payment flow discourages spending.

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xxpor an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Stops Comcast from seeing the metadata and knowing exactly what their mutual customers are streaming.

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booi an hour ago | parent [-]

wait till you hear about what smart tvs do..

	▲	the-smug-one an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I refused to connect my TV to the internet and use a Vero V for all of my watching needs. The Vero V is absolutely worse than most other experiences, but I'm happy.

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monocasa 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It seems like it took engineering work, but TLS isn't their bottleneck when the data flow is structured correctly for the hardware (which is kind of the thesis of a lot of the Netflix CDN node optimization stuff).