[masukomi]

this is how CDNs make their money. They replicate popular content close to the users. They generally do that WITHOUT giving anyone hardware, but by renting hardware in smaller areas, and setting up their own data centers in popular areas.

source: I used to work at Akamai (it was a while ago). The myriad things they do with their edge servers is pretty amazing, but for simple CDN stuff, most of the time clients aren't shipping hardware to isps. That being said, if Netflix can convince an isp to pay its electricity and hardware maintenance costs for a popular isp's customers that's going to pay for itself very quickly. So, i can see why Netflix offers this. It's just not normal AFAIK.