I don’t know where to ask this question so if this is the wrong place then I can take direction.

I was thinking about my plex server and my upload speed and the number of clients I could serve. I have the 4k release of the Thing where the average bitrate is close to 100Mbps. I could maybe serve 5 people on my setup if they all played that.

Then I got to thinking about Netflix, Disney, etc. and how they all serve 4k files to millions of people. That’s an enormous amount of data they’re pushing out to the internet.

If they’re serving an average bitrate file of 50Mbps to a million people? Dude that upload speed is ridiculous. Do they really have upload speeds that high or am I missing something here

  • onlygon@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    4K streams are heavily compressed. It generally ranges from 5Mbs to 25Mbs depending on factors. This is why physical media is championed so much. A full bit rate 1080p blu ray will almost always have more detail than a 4K web stream.

    But most people are not paying for 4K premium content. And compression tech like AV1 will help lower the bit rate when adoption rates are better. Look up AV1 vs VP9 vs HEVC vs AVC. It’s looking to be a major improvement.

    Also, these large companies are not at all structured like a home network with a single egress. They are very large networks with multiple ingress/egress, multiple cache points in multiple regions, etc. to distribute the load.