Netflix Crippled On Christmas Eve By AWS Outages

On December 24, 2012 Netflix has been down since 1pm PST for some customers. Reason?

Well, "problems are originating in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region. The latest ELB update at 5:49pm PST reads “we continue to work on resolving issues with the Elastic Load Balancing Service in the US-EAST-1 region. Traffic for some ELBs are currently experiencing significant levels of traffic loss.”"

As Netflix Cloud Architect Adrian Cockcroft said on Twitter:

Bunch of ELBs down, lots of happy Netflix instances getting no traffic, still waiting for AWS to fix it. Some devices working, others not.

— adrian cockcroft (@adrianco) December 25, 2012

Interesting thing is that this is the latest in a series of high profile Web outages related to Amazon Web Services. In October, issues at AWS affected Reddit, Pinterest, Airbnb, Foursquare, Minecraft and other popular Web sites, while back in May, outages at AWS data centers took down Pinterest, Instagram and Netflix.

Source: http://goo.gl/YxDUa

‎Amazon.com Confirms It’s Ended $7.99 Monthly Prime Trial

In the beginning of November we wrote about Amazon Prime which offered unlimited TV and movie streaming for $7.99 per month.

Amazon provided TechCrunch with the following statement confirming it has suspended the service:

"We regularly test new options for our customers. At this time, we are no longer signing up new customers for monthly memberships of Amazon Prime."

Amazon would not comment on why the test has been terminated after such a short period.

Source: http://goo.gl/lWBbg

YouTube prepares its second YouTube Channels push, 60% of content partners to lose funding.

YouTube introduced professional channels — an initiative to add original content to the Web’s top video site — back in December 2011, after an investment of $100 million; but the fresh money will only be seen by 30 to 40 percent of its 100 plus channel partners, which were recruited to make the service more TV-like and competitive against video-on-demand (VoD) services.

The money is, as it was last year, not a free lunch since it is essentially an upfront payment of one year of advertising revenues. Each producer must earn the money back via ads attached to their content before they can make additional revenue from the service. For example, $1 million comes it at 50 million views on a $20 CPM (cost per mil/thousand) – fairly high stakes.

Netflix recently announced Q3 revenues of $905 million and the US firm expects to make $400 million of operating income this year after covering its global operating expenses. Amazon, which owns UK Netflix competitor LoveFilm, is also in the game and is trialing an $8 per month subscription for its Prime service.

http://goo.gl/xZQAT

Image via http://goo.gl/GBOQ2

Netflix Has Plenty of Competitors, and None of Them Are Close.

Sandvine says that during the Web’s primetime hours, Netflix accounts for 33 percent of “downstream” traffic in North America, and it’s higher than it was in the spring of 2011, before Netflix raised its prices and lost some of its best-known movies.

YouTube accounts for 15 percent of Web use, but that site is almost entirely free. Netflix’s paid competitors generate much smaller numbers: Amazon is at 1.8 percent, Hulu is at 1.1 percent and HBO Go comes in at 0.5 percent. Bear in mind that Sandvine is tracking the flow of data via broadband pipes, which means it is tracking usage — and file size – instead of reach. Netflix, for instance, has about 25 million subscribers worldwide, while YouTube boasts some 800 million monthly visitors.

http://goo.gl/cIpqN

Source: Sandvine

Amazon takes on Netflix and Hulu Plus.

Amazon Prime offers unlimited TV and movie streaming for $7.99 per month. Amazon is clearly hoping that price-matching its competitors will help drive more subscriptions.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/prime