Streaming video at Netflix's scale in the year 2010 was hard though?

I mean sure, it's a lot easier nowadays - but that's mostly down to cloud providers replacing half of the server-side challenge with a big bill and fiber making the last mile easier too.

You're massively underestimating the challenge of transferring these vast amounts of data without interrupting service for buffing etc that they had to solve back then

Pornhub solved it much earlier with PHP

tbf it’s easier if you only need to serve the first 5 minutes of a video

According to Pornhub's 2024 Insights blog post, (nope, not gonna provide an URL, use a search engine :))"

    "...making the average engagement time per visit 9 minutes and 40 seconds"

Reading about the variance and what demographic groups visited the site for shorter or longer amounts of time will keep you amused.

ah I know the blog post ;) I just thought it was ~5 minutes, but its ~10 minutes ;) still way easier to do that than netflix ;)