Considering the bills I've seen for AWS at even modestly-sized companies, I would not be surprised if Netflix spends more than $80M a year on AWS. In fact, considering the amount of bandwidth they use, I'd be surprised if they didn't.
They spent $1.3B on "General/Administrative Expenses" last year - think more than 6% of that was infrastructure?
Quite possibly, but also keep in mind that there's no way Netflix pays anywhere remotely near AWS published prices. I'd be surprised if they pay even 1/5th of the published prices.
Especially on bandwidth, anyone can buy bandwidth at well below 20% of AWS prices elsewhere. Netflix shouldn't be paying even 10% of published AWS bandwidth prices given their volumes.
Most of Netflix's bandwidth goes through their Open Connect CDN, which isn't hosted on Amazon's infrastructure but is rather a traditional setup of colocated servers in strategically positioned data centers.
Previous to this arrangement Netflix used 3rd party CDNs like Akamai which again did not sit on Amazon's infrastructure.
That said I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with any assessment of how much Amazon costs are.
Amazon Prime reminds me of how the telecommunications industry sell services. They have customers signed up to a bundle of services like: landline, mobile, cable/satellite TV and broadband.
If the customers don't want TV they are put on a free tier rather than being cancelled, so they are still officially a TV subscriber and can boost the viewing figures for the service.
It's useful to be vague if you are in a dying industry or your competitors are better established.
I think they meant Netflix pays Amazon more per year for infrastructure than Amazon makes on Prime instant. It's hard to say how much Prime streaming makes per year since it's also part of the 2 day shipping.
