As every company in the world and then some think that creating streaming service is easy you just need some content, I think they forget a couple of very important aspects of the successful service that are not trivial to implement.
The human brain perceives anything less than 250 milliseconds as instant. So when making Spotify, the CEO and founder Daniel Ek wanted the service to feel instant to make an illusion that every single song is right there on the users hard drive.
“We spent an insane amount of time focusing on latency when no
one cared because we were hell bent on making it feel like you had all
the world’s music on your hard drive. Obsessing over small details can
sometimes make all the difference. That’s what I believe is the biggest
misunderstanding about the minimum viable product concept. That is the V
in the MVP.” – Daniel Ek
When creating Evernote, Libin believed that responsiveness is crucial to the app experience and there couldn’t be any delay between searching for something and results popping up, so Evernote stored everything locally on the hard drive (although it was a right incentive, the implementation was bad, but it is different point).
The same point goes for Netflix, you’ve probably experienced it, when you start watching a movie or a TV show, press play and it starts playing immediately. Especially if it is something new and popular. That is because Netflix partners with ISPs and deploys appliances with the most popular content right to them, that way, when you are watching the newest Netflix original that Netflix heavily pushes, you might be streaming it not from Netflix itself, but from your ISP. And by the way, Netflix doesn’t charge the IPSs at all, so they have only technical or legal requirements to fill.
That is why Netflix has a big advantage over other streaming services, this is an expertise you gather over the years and understanding of your customers, you get only by collecting watching data. That way Netflix can predict what will people in certain regions watch and preload the appliances with the most relevant content.
You may not even realize, but you notice little hiccups in the apps you use, the instant is very important in the user experience.