The Dangers in the Cloud for Streaming Video Providers

The news of Netflix closing its last dedicated data center hit the wires recently to fanfare from the industry. The lede was easy to understand – cloud remains a hot strategic move for tech companies – the realities less so.

For Netflix and other content providers, content delivery is tricky. The Internet was not fundamentally constructed to deliver data synchronously – in other words, delivering a stream of data at a consistent speed so that it can be processed in something approaching real-time demands the Internet work in a way it was not intended to.