Everybody, I'm Mike Smith I from Open Connect, which is part of the Netflix family. And I work specifically in the US and Canada. And I happen to be here in DC, I'm actually from Seattle. And so when you think about Open Connect, or when we think about Open Connect, really, we have one purpose. And that's to make sure that when you press play, you can watch the content from wherever, whenever and from whatever device you want to watch it from. That's really what we do. The start of the show, of course, is the content, we're just on the technology side. And we always want the technology just to be the basis so that we can get some great content. So what is Open Connect? Well, it's a CDN, a content delivery network. And if this were an engineering conference, and I had an hour, I could explain that to you. But I don't have an hour. And thankfully, it's not an engineering conference. So I could do this one of two ways, I could in five minutes or so, I could talk really quickly with a lot of industry specific acronyms and sound like a five year old explaining dinosaurs. Or I could talk about pizza. Now, the problem with pizza, of course, is that everybody has very strong opinions about the type of pizza they like. And so I do run the risk of offending people. And so rather than running that risk, I'm going to offend everybody. And we're going to talk about a pizza that's made with anchovy pineapple on an Alfredo hubbins. So that's the pizza we're talking about. So before we had open connected pizza delivery, back in my day, you actually had to dial a phone call, and ask somebody to deliver you a pizza. And so when that happened, of course, you ordered the pizza, you went down to the shop, and by the time you got it back to your house, it was slightly cold, it had been jostled around in the back of your car. And it was essentially a terrible experience. And so somebody wisely thought, well, if we put these pizza shops locally and the neighbor votes, then people are going to get their pizza faster, it's going to get too hot every time. And that is essentially what a content delivery network is, we move the content closer to the edge. So that gets there faster and with greater shirt. And when we look at this, when we think about a content delivery network, it's actually fairly simple we have on the left hand side, those are that's the Netflix sites. And in those sites, we have servers and lots of servers. And one of the kind of the key concepts we're talking about is efficiency. And we are very efficient with our servers. And the way that we do that is we made sure that we only have the right amount of servers that we need to deliver content for that specific area. And we also make sure that the servers are optimized so that they can deliver the most content possible. And then, of course, when you press play, all of this content has to go the Internet. And so what we try to do by moving that content out to the edge of a network, we reduce the likelihood that we're going to run into problems that could happen is an example, you know, from our pizza delivery, if I have to get over a pizza from New Jersey, versus from down the street, I run the risk that I'm going to have congestion, I'm going to have to take a different route, we're going to have an accident, I won't be able to get through the Internet is very much the same way those things, concepts of congestion and having outages all of that is exactly the same. And so but when we put the content out to the edge, that is, you know, the pizza shot that's right down the street from me, we make sure that we're not using those resources. And then, of course, on the device side, any device anytime. So if you look at what that looks like in the United States, if, if you this looks a lot like one of those satellite maps, when you see, you know, they're going to show the light usage. At night, it's very similar. And the reason it's similar is because we obviously have to have a density of servers in the same places where people are, which very much maps to what these locations look like. And in this one, the red ones, obviously are the largest. And you can see there around the metropolitan areas. But also, if you're even somewhere, you know, in the rural Midwest, some still have servers that are close to you. And that's kind of the key of the content delivery. So what we're solving the problems that we're solving here, the the to get back to that pizza analogy. When you say about it, what the servers are doing is they're building these files. And the files actually, in our analogy have three different components. They have the anchovies, which is the audio portion. They have the pineapple which is the video portion, and then they have the sauce, which is the Samsung darts. And so that's subtitles and dubs, and so we put all of those together. And from that then we create this single file that we send over the Internet it. And this now unfortunately, I couldn't carry this analogy completely through. And so the next I am going to show you a chart. And it's, it's hard. So let me just bring it up here, I could actually carry it through so that we could talk about pizzas in this. But really what we're talking about here is optimizing that file that we've made from those ingredients. And what we're trying to do is make sure that we're using as little of the Internet as possible to deliver the same quality of content that you would expect. And so that's in our terms, we call that encoding. And when we started this back in 2012, to 2015, the codes were not very efficient. And so it took a lot more data to be able to get to the same watch the same video that you can watch today. And it's really almost we've had about 100% efficiency increase. And Netflix is arguably one of the best at making those files as small as possible and using as little of the Internet resources as possible to deliver that content. So So that's actually it turns out the pizza analogy is actually very quick and I'm thankful that you're not engineers. I don't have to go through the technology discussion on this. We do have a booth and I'll be available for comments if you are or questions if you want to stop by and say hello and hopefully you guys enjoy Netflix content more than you would enjoy a pizza made from anchovies and pineapple and I'm go ahead and tell me what your wins and scan the card apparently I don't know what that means but scan the card. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of... God bless
