The article seems to focus too much on the consumer side of the bandwidth equation. I think the real win for Netflix is the aggregate egress bandwidth savings from their DCs. If Netflix can halve their bandwidth (as the article seems to claim) without any appreciable loss in quality, they've just saved substantially in the infrastructure and peering contracts needed to deliver their content. I have no idea how much money Netflix currently spends on bandwidth/CDN, but I'd guess it's certainly in the 100s of millions. I can imagine that Amazon and Apple would be very interested in emulating those savings.
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