Netflix leverages Open Connect to sustain 15% of global internet traffic

Netflix’s proprietary CDN strategy shifts the infrastructure burden from the public internet backbone to the ISP edge, setting the benchmark for high-throughput media delivery. By owning the full stack—from custom hardware to per-scene encoding algorithms—Netflix achieves 99.99% availability with less than 53 minutes of annual downtime, a target competitors using off-the-shelf CDNs struggle to match. As the industry pivots toward live sports and high-bitrate 4K content, this model demonstrates that vertical integration is the only viable path to managing massive concurrent loads without degrading quality. Watch for whether Netflix licenses its Open Connect software stack to third-party streamers to further monetize its infrastructure advantage.

Beyond its core delivery architecture, Netflix has aggressively scaled its adoption of the AV1 codec to enhance efficiency. Per Broadband TV News (December 2025), AV1 now powers 30% of all viewing on the platform, delivering a 45% reduction in buffering interruptions compared to legacy formats. The company also reached a major milestone in March 2025 by launching AV1-based HDR streaming with HDR10+ metadata, which now covers 85% of its HDR catalog. This transition is critical as Netflix targets $3 billion in advertising revenue for 2026, a 100% increase over 2025 levels according to company guidance cited by Broadband TV News (April 2026).

Infrastructure upgrades for 2026 focus on higher density and lower latency. New Open Connect appliances now feature 560 TB of NVMe flash storage in a 2U footprint, nearly doubling previous capacities to accommodate a global library that reached 18,200 titles in early 2026. Per BlazingCDN (June 2025), Netflix has also migrated the majority of its streaming sessions to the QUIC protocol. This move significantly improves connection stability for mobile users, who represent a growing share of the platform's 325 million total subscribers as of early 2026.

Strategically, Netflix is preparing for a massive expansion of its delivery requirements. Per Analysis Mason (January 2026), the company's agreement to acquire Warner Bros. (pending regulatory approval) could see the migration of the HBO Max catalog onto the Open Connect platform. This would integrate over 400 million combined revenue-generating units onto a single proprietary CDN, potentially forcing a significant scale-up of the ISP-embedded appliance network to handle the unified traffic load.