I love these kinds of questions! To start, we have to understand how customers at AWS are charged. The payment is calculated by taking the amount of storage used by the company as well as the data traffic, per month.

Let’s start by looking at how many users Netflix has: 117 million. Let’s assume, that every customer, paying a monthly fee, is watching on average at least 1 maybe 1.5 hours a day (can include passive watching on the sofa in the evening). Let’s take 1.4 hours as a measure, which is proved by some statistics on Google. That means, that Netflix content is streamed 1.4*117,000,000 hours per day, which comes to 163,800,000 hours per day or 1,178,100,000 hours per week. Let’s look at the streaming size per minute. When watching in standard 360p, the computer streams about 250MB per hour, or 4.2MB per minute. Compared to watching the stream in Full HD, the download rate is approximately at 20MB per minute. Let’s assume, that between mobile, computer and TV streaming customers, the average definition is at 720p. Thus we have a download size of about 850MB / 0.85 GB per hour of streamed content. That means, Netflix has an AWS data traffic, only for streaming, of 1 billion GB per week. Thats 1,000 Petabytes, to make the number more readable.. We will leave data streaming used for their website and trailers and video previews out of the picture, as this would be minor compared to the actual streaming volume.

Let’s look at what AWS charges for their services, assuming that Netflix is charged as a normal customer. I’ll leave out the cost approximation for the storage volume, as I find it nearly to impossible to properly guess the amount of content Netflix offers. If you know, feel free to comment and I’ll add that part.

For large companies, AWS charges $0.021 per transferred GB per month. As we calculated above, Netflix transfers about 1 billion GB of data to their customers per week, thus 4 billion GB of data per month. That makes a beautiful bill of $84 million per month, or $1 billion per year. With a yearly revenue of about $15 billion, the servers cost Netflix about 7% of their total volume, which can be considered very cheap, as Netflix’s largest cost factor, besides their Original series, are their server and streaming costs.