Which CDN does Netflix and Hulu use and how can they offer unlimited streaming for $10 per month?

Question

Do anybody know which CDN Netflix and Hulu use for hosting their content and what they are paying for traffic/streaming costs?

(meaning; how can they possibly offer unlimited streaming for about $10 per month when considering all the streaming traffic costs I would think that they have to pay?)

Also, is it possible to set up Silverlight Smooth Streaming via Amazon CloudFront?

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We want to offer our clients the ability to sell their full-length movies in Silverlight Smooth Streaming HD 720p format.

One full length movie at 3 Mbps may be around 1.8 GB and our clients wants to sell rental for e.g. $5 for 48 hours access.

The biggest CDNs are quoting prices in the $0.50 (and more) per GB traffic pricing range.

That means that the traffic costs for streaming the movie only once may be around 20% of the cost of the movie and additional views by the same user will make the traffic cost eat almost the whole (or even more) of the cost of the movie very quickly, making the business model essentially useless.

Thanks for any insight you can share on this.

Answer 1

From Hulu's website

Who are some of Hulu’s top technology partners? Hulu leverages several technology partners to help provide a high-quality and trusted service for our users including Akamai, who manages our content delivery network (CDN), and Adobe who is Hulu’s video player platform provider.

It appears Netflix also use Akamai for 51% of their traffic for a reported $0.015 per GB (sources here and here).

Answer 2

Netflix uses Akamai. From my caps:

Internet Protocol, Src: a224.w31.akamai.net (168.143.241.24), Dst: 192.168.2.4 (192.168.2.4)