"Some of you still know what a buffering looks like. Our job is to eliminate that. We want to make buffering a historic relic where your kids say to you, what's buffer?" Netflix co-founder and chief executive Reed Hastings says. There's a sense of determination on his face as he welcomes us -- a small group of reporters from around the world -- to the company HQ in Los Gatos, California.

But it's his honest-to-goodness smile that really wins you over. Makes you want to believe everything's possible. It won't be easy. Especially in India. But, that's the least of his problems. For India is different.

"India is hugely important for Netflix in the long term because it's one of the strongest Internet markets (in the world) and Internet TV is the future," Hastings had reiterated on his maiden trip to India in March earlier this year. It's a critical market "because there are (already) over 300 million mobile broadband users here" and each one of them is a potential subscriber. Netflix currently has over 94 million subscribers globally and nearly 40 million is based outside the US.

"India is one of the top three markets for Netflix in terms of mobile usage. In fact, it's stronger than all of the other Asian nations."

Problem is our Internet is slow. And it's also very expensive, although "we're seeing Internet data costs -- from 20 years ago to now -- continuing to drop. Of course with Reliance Jio, no one has (d) ever seen a free mobile network that cost 20 billion dollars to build. It's one of the more extraordinary things anywhere in the world."

While Jio's certainly a start, it's no magic wand. Things we're dealing with here can't change overnight. It will take some time. And effort. Netflix, is aware of the fact, and it's doing its bit. Because it can. It is the only Internet streaming company in the world that focuses not only on the content side of things, but, on technology responsible for delivering that content to end-users.

Also Read: Netflix is taking India very seriously and Reliance Jio has a lot to do with it

We're often asked, are you a tech company, or are you a content company? And we point out that great companies combine multiple skills. If you think about Apple with the iPod and the iPhone, they were basically a jewelry company and an amazing technology company. And they figured out how to sell technology -- a phone -- as a piece of jewelry. Apple succeeded because they combined two skills that no one had combined before successfully. For Netflix, we're trying to combine an amazing studio that's producing some of the world's most interesting content with great technology," Hastings says.

While it's no secret that Netflix makes some amazing original shows, it's its technology side that's all the more fascinating.

Long-distance can be hard

How Netflix is actually able to get tens of terabits of date delivered every second simultaneously to people -- in 190 countries including in India -- at home or on their cell phones or wherever they are and yet come out "being a better steward of the Internet than rival platforms" is easily the most fascinating aspect. Every time a Netflix original goes live, and millions of people around the world start streaming it on the go, there's (still) very little additional traffic on the Internet because of Open Connect, the company's own in-house CDN (content delivery network).

"We started the Open Connect Project in late 2010. 2011 was when we rolled out our first ever production server," explains Ken Florance who is VP of content delivery at Netflix. "We design the hardware and the software that runs on these servers. Then we connect them directly to an ISP (Internet Service Provider) network," he adds.

In layman's terms, Open Connect devices are custom-build caching servers placed in data centers of major ISPs (and Internet exchange locations) that store all your favorite (and least favorite) Netflix shows ready to be spun out to whatever client you're using at the press of a button. Your client then renders that data into an image. "In 95 per cent of cases around the world we are directly connected to a local network." That way, subscribers in India won't stream a show from servers all the way in the US, but from a copy hosted on an Open Connect server closer to it in Asia. The goal is always to minimise long-distance network traffic, and distribute files as fast as possible.

There are also instances when the company will have an Open Connect server right inside a network "because the closer we are to whoever is watching the content, the less chances of interruption and the more chances of putting a well sustained network that allows us to do the video delivery well."

"We're often asked, are you a tech company, or are you a content company? And we point out that great companies combine multiple skills. For Netflix, we're trying to combine an amazing studio that's producing some of the world's most interesting content with great technology," says Reed Hastings

If you were to talk about Asia, there are currently Open Connect servers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. There are a few anonymous servers in India as well, but, the company wouldn't tell exactly which ISPs are on-board.

"We don't charge anybody for our servers. So if you're an ISP and you want an Open Connect server or a dozen of them or 100 of them in your network, we give them to you for free because it's a real benefit to us," Ken says. "Our subscribers get a better video quality with less chance of interruption and it's a real benefit to the ISP because if they're delivering Netflix data from inside their network they're not having to build out capacity to reach it elsewhere. So it's a pretty simple equation," he adds.

Because Open Connect servers are developed in-house, engineers at Netflix can also focus on making them smarter, which is what makes them different from the crowd. Open Connect servers can proactively cache content they predict subscribers will want to watch based on their current watching behavior and they are also able to fill those caches through an extremely lightweight process.

"A standard CDN would basically just decide what to cache based on the number of requests for a particular object. What we do instead is use a lot of similar algorithms to decide how to recommend the right content to people and we fill these caches while you're asleep when your network is almost unused so that capacity is free for sure."

Which is also why Netflix has two different versions of Open Connect servers, one with hard drives and another housing flash drives. While hard drive servers store the entire Netflix catalog, the flash servers store the most popular content. "The stuff that's high on demand is being served from the flash because it's much more efficient."

So, when a show like the House of Cards launches, copies of the season are already in place where people are likely to watch it and subscribers don't have to deal with buffering. In a market like India, as mentioned earlier, things are different. It's not so much about buffering (or the lack of it) as it is about the lack of a steady Internet connection. Netflix apparently has a solution for that as well.

Every bit counts

"We don't want to send bits out and use bandwidth if those bits are not going to increase the visual quality or improve the video that our subscribers are watching. At the same time, we want our subscribers to have the best user experience possible. Whether they're on a 20 mbps connection or whether they're in a very constrained low bandwidth," says Anne Aaron who is chief director of video algorithms at Netflix.

At MWC 2017, Netflix announced new video formats because in the words of Anne herself, "every bit counts." Her team -- at Netflix -- aspires to offer a great viewing experience where subscribers would enjoy their favorite TV shows and movies at any bit rate. Streaming to a mobile phone took one and a half megabits back in the day and then over the years, Netflix improved that to one megabit to half a megabit which is 500 kilobits. It is now down to 200 kilobits.

At the current 200 kilobits rate, you can get a great picture on a 4 or 5-inch screen and you can watch 25 hours of content in 1GB data according to the company. But, Netflix isn't through yet. At MWC, Reed Hastings announced that the company was working on a ludicrous 100 kilobits rate.

In fact, Netflix is ready and is ironing out the kinks in the format as we speak, Anne confirms. The company is hoping to go live with the new format by the end of this year. "If you have a 2GB plan, a 100 kilobits rate would allow you to watch about 30 hours of Netflix. So you'll be able to watch a whole 2 seasons." The quality of course wouldn't be as good as one on a faster bit-rate, but if "I'm really bandwidth constrained and if I don't want to use my data, you know this would be very, very enjoyable for me," Anne says.

But what's enjoyable for one may not be enjoyable for all. "We've run tests where people actually look at the video -- at 100 kilobits rate -- and then they rate it. We use that data to train our machine learning algorithms. So we run those tests both at Netflix and we also outsource it to different labs all over the world that are experts in this."

Also Read: Netflix to get like-based rating system because it's the language of the Internet

Creating low bit-rate file formats is just one aspect that Anne's team takes pride in. There's much more to it than what meets the eye.

Anne recounts how in the initial run, Netflix was following a one-size-fits-all fixed bit-rate model that delivered high quality encodes for most content, turning a blind eye to the fact that a one-size-fits-all approach may not always provide the best video quality for a given title or the subscriber's allowable bandwidth. Simply because not all content is created equal.

How Netflix is actually able to get tens of terabits of date delivered every second simultaneously to people -- in 190 countries including in India -- at home or on their cell phones or wherever they are and yet come out "being a better steward of the Internet than rival platforms" is easily the most fascinating aspect

While animated shows like Bojack Horseman can be reproduced with comparatively little data, a show like Marvel's Daredevil -- which is full of fast-paced action and different environment scenarios -- comprises much more visual detail. Realising this, Netflix in 2015, moved into per-title encoding. "Under low-bandwidth conditions, per-title encoding will often give you better video quality as titles with simple content will now be streamed at a higher resolution for the same bit-rate. When the available bandwidth is adequate for high bit-rate encodes, per-title encoding will often give you even better video quality for complex titles, because we will encode at a higher maximum bit-rate."

Having said that, there can be instances when a 'simple' animated show might get complex somewhere in the middle. What then? Realising this, Netflix then moved into per-chunk encoding.

"We were already dividing the video into chunks because that's how we encode things in the cloud. We encode things in parallel in the cloud. So we decided why not optimise every chunk, which is in the order of a minute to 3 minutes." But, Netflix wasn't through yet. Anne and Co. then went on to explore per-shot encoding because "why stop at per-chunk encoding?" "It's not just bit rate, it's other parameters that we can optimise per shot and the idea is that we can optimise the video quality and allocate the bits optimally for the whole title, but optimising per shot to give us the best overall quality," Anne says.

Lost in translation

Since Netflix launched globally, the scale of its localisation efforts has also increased dramatically. It's hard to believe that just 5 years ago, the Internet streaming service only supported English, Spanish and Portuguese. It now has 20 languages and 572 language assets (subtitles, audio dubs, audio descriptions et al) to its name. And that number continues to grow.

Hindi isn't supported for now. "I think overtime we'll see. We're not committing to anything yet because we've only been there (in India) for a year and, you know, I think we're just getting traction there and we're relying on English right now to get us there but I'm sure in the future we would look into that," Denny Sheehan who is director of content localisation and quality control at Netflix reiterates.

Netflix understands that it is fast approaching an inflection point where English won't necessarily be the primary viewing experience anymore, which is why it has launched HERMES, an online subtitling and translation test to find the best translators in the world. Although the service doesn't support Hindi yet, the national language of India does make the cut for HERMES.

"I believe Hindi is in there yes, absolutely and so you know, we're going to continue to add about four languages a quarter to the test." But, "that doesn't have anything to do with what languages will be available on the service. It's just that we wanted to make sure that we are continuing to evolve the test," Chris Fetner who is director of media engineering partnerships at Netflix asserts.

A pricey proposition

All said and done, Netflix is still quite expensive a service when compared with rival platforms like Amazon Prime and India's go-to service for live sports, that is, Hotstar. Prices start at Rs 500 for basic and go all the way to Rs 800 for its premium package that lets you simultaneously watch content on as many as four different screens. And that's Rs 500/Rs 800 every month post the free one month trial period.

"We don't see a problem with that at all. We're having a great service. We think it'll be well worth it. There's close to thirty million iPhone owners in India who, you know, spent a thousand dollars for an iPhone. So there's a huge market that has the ability and interest in the kind of content that we have and so that's really the segment that we're going after," Reed Hastings says.

"Eventually, you know, if we get big in that segment and we want to, say, get big in the rural areas, or things like that, that would be a second stage. But it's plenty of market for us because India's so big, for the first couple years," he adds.