Comment by lucb1e

I'd be interested in the calculation there. How many movies does the server store in the first place? Computing over all of Netflix (just their movies, not even the series) for every request, even if you could then obtain the full movie with just one request, seems almost prohibitive. I'm also assuming the author counted on the server being busy the whole time (on-demand pricing) and not having to have spare capacity idling for when multiple requests come in at the same time.

For me, compute has always been by far my expense, and that's without homomorphic encryption! Buying a server or the monthly rental (e.g. VPS) costs is where most of my budget goes. Next on the expense list are a few domain names, and probably about as much in electricity if we're considering the at-home scenario. Bandwidth is usually included, be it with the VPS or with the server I run at home (since I want that internet uplink for normal use anyway).