Behind the Scenes - What exactly is a Netflix Cache Server?

Ever wondered how your evening high-definition Netflix viewing or favourite YouTube videos get streamed so quickly, without buffering?

If you’re watching popular content, like that latest series of Narcos then it’s more than likely coming from a local cache server hosted at the Voyager data centre.

What is a cache server?

Voyager customers stream so much video content that both Google and Netflix have installed streaming cache servers in our data centres. These servers have lots of disk drives and download the most popular content from Netflix and YouTube from overseas and save them to local storage. When you flick on your TV and click to watch the latest episode, this starts a stream from the local Voyager cache server.

The cache server can handle thousands of streams for the same video content, but only has to download the original source from overseas once.

For Voyager customers this means high definition content streams quickly from local servers and for Voyager it means we save on international bandwidth, as we don’t have to download multiple copies of the same content to serve many customers.

You can find out more about Netflix caches here: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-around-the-globe-to-deliver-a-great-viewing-experience

Quick fact:

Voyager is a YouTube HD Verified Internet Provider: 93% of YouTube videos watched by Voyager customers are in HD