After the global surveillance efforts by countries including the USA were revealed, there has been a push to adopt HTTPS to prevent such eavesdropping. Netflix is the latest major player to push the technology onto their service, despite the 'significant cost' to do so.
In its April earnings report, Netflix confirmed it will roll out HTTPS across its service over the next year, saying the adoption will help protect "member privacy, particularly when the network is insecure, such as public wifi, and it helps protect members from eavesdropping by their ISP or employer, who may want to record our members' viewing for other reasons." [sic]
The deployment is not a easy one for Netflix though, in a email to the W3 mailing list, Netflix revealed that while experimenting with a HTTPS deployment for over the past six months, it has discovered a potential 30-53% hit to its infrastructure capacity, costing it millions each year.
After some tweaking, it was able to cut that hit by around 70-80%, allowing it to go ahead with the deployment. Netflix said that although the costs are significant, it was justified for the privacy gains.
Netflix has not revealed the exact costs it will incur with the deployment.
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