Netflix, a media streaming service focusing on movies and TV shows that operates in the United States and some parts of Europe, is working exclusively on FreeBSD operating systems.

It's hard to imagine that such big company would not rely on some proprietary solution for their service, but Netflix is actually a big supporter of the open source community.

According to their website, Netflix delivers streaming content using a combination of intelligent clients, a central control system, and a network of Open Connect appliances.

Their Open Connect Appliance Software has to meet certain criteria, such as the use of open source software, the ability to efficiently read from disk and write to network sockets, high-performance HTTP delivery, and the ability to gather routing information via BGP.

“For the operating system, we use FreeBSD version 9.0. This was selected for its balance of stability and features, a strong development community and staff expertise. We will contribute changes we make as part of our project to the community through the FreeBSD committers on our team,” reads the Netflix website.

The provider also uses the nginx web server, which is an open source solution known for its reliability. Netflix audio and video is served via HTTP.

The company also took the time to thank the open source community for the invaluable help they are providing in making the steaming service a reality.

“We would like to express our thanks to the FreeBSD community, the nginx community, and Ondrej and the BIRD team for providing excellent open source software. We also work directly with Igor, Maxim, Andrew, Sergey, Ruslan and the rest of the team at nginx.com, who provide superb development support for our project,”

You can check the official website for more details about the technologies they employ for the steaming service.