Netflix, the streaming and DVD Rental Company provides viewers with a variety of films and television shows that can be streamed over the internet for a monthly fee of £5.99.
The company’s new venture into the UK and Ireland seeks to rival BSkyB and Lovefilm with the firms’ chief executive, Reed Hastings, confident Nexflix will fare well here. "We have more content than Lovefilm," he said.
Those who subscribe to the service will also be able to view programmes on several devices that are internet-enabled like smartphones and even gaming consoles. Netflix currently boasts over 20 million subscribers.
The service has proven popular in the 47 countries where it is already available, with 20 million members worldwide. The move of Netflix to the UK, however, will mean extra work for UK telecoms providers.
UK communication service providers may incur high costs to deliver the high demand of quality video delivery. While solutions to the potential problem like transcoding or bit-rate throttling help in reducing the mass amount of data running over the network the reduced amount may still prove to be significant enough. This will be a huge challenge to telecoms providers.
The VP EMEA for Infinera, Chris Champion said: "Telecoms providers in the UK have made great strides in terms of meeting the demand for bandwidth hungry services and the likes of BBC iPlayer have put a heavy strain on the network. But if Netflix replicates just a proportion of its success in the UK, it will mean carriers have to raise the bar again."
Champion believes the surge of mobile, video, and cloud based services have made it so 500 GB/s fibre optic superchannels may be needed to carry the capacity needed in the future and that operators could embrace this as an opportunity to prepare their network for the future with new and innovative technologies. As opposed to transcoding or bit-rate throttling innovations like Photonic Integration could be a solution.
"Photonic Integration makes it possible to lower the ‘cost per bit’ of this traffic enabling carriers to capitalise on the resulting margin that demand for premium connections will generate" said Champion.
