What do you think were the dynamics of the engineering team working on this?
I'd think this isn't too crazy to stress test. If you have 300 million users signed up then you're stress test should be 300 million simultaneous streams in HD for 4 hours. I just don't see how Netflix screws this up.
Maybe it was a management incompetence thing? Manager says something like "We only need to support 20 million simultaneous streams" and engineers implement to that spec even if the 20 million number is wildly incorrect.
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