How does Netflix Manage Video Delivery?

Greg Sandoval, interviewed Neil Hunt (pictured), chief product officer, Netfilx (since 1999) to The Verge getting some interesting quotes about Netflix network challenges:

• A big piece is the actual delivery: making sure that we can continue to deliver 30-percent plus of the total internet downstream traffic. That's a big project. Our initiative with Open Connect [here and here] ... As part of Open Connect, we pay the cost and expense of installing Open Connect servers at common peering points or within an ISP's network at the most effective point. This makes it easier and more efficient for an ISP to deliver the best quality Netflix video, including our Super HD and 3D streams, by caching Netflix videos close to consumers and thus offloading it from a good part of an ISP's network
   
• .. In Europe, essentially all of our traffic is delivered through Open Connect .. The major ISPs in Europe like British Telecom have embraced Open Connect and deployed servers very rapidly .. we're able to upload new content to Open Connect caches overnight in off-peak traffic, because we know the content and what will be popular tomorrow we don't fill on cache-miss, like most CDNs
    
• We bring in hundreds of hours a week of new content, encoded in many formats and different bit rates for all the devices [here] we support. That's a fair amount of traffic pushed out towards to the servers every night
     
• we expect to be delivering 4K within a year or two with at least some movies and then over time become an important source of 4K. 4K will likely be streamed first before it goes anywhere else.

Source: Netflix 2012 Q4 Report

See "Netflix Chief Product Officer: expect 4K streaming within a year or two" - here.