How Nebula Works

Links to everything I do:

Credits:
Producer/Co-Writer/Narrator: Brian McManus
Technical Consultants: Casey Vincent and Nick Arnott
Writer: Dave Wiskus
Head of Production: Mike Ridolfi
Editor: Dylan Hennessy
Animator: Eli Prenten
Animator: Rilly Brown
Producer/Sound: Graham Haerther
Thumbnail: Simon Buckmaster
Head of Moral: Shia LaWoof

Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images
Thank you to AP Archive for access to their archival footage.

Thank you to my patreon supporters: Abdullah Alotaibi, Adam Flohr, Henning Basma, Hank Green, William Leu, Tristan Edwards, Ian Dundore, John & Becki Johnston. Nevin Spoljaric, Jason Clark, Thomas Barth, Johnny MacDonald, Stephen Foland, Alfred Holzheu, Abdulrahman Abdulaziz Binghaith, Brent Higgins, Dexter Appleberry, Alex Pavek, Marko Hirsch, Mikkel Johansen, Hibiyi Mori. Viktor Józsa, Ron Hochsprung

Given my IT background, nothing in this video really surprised me, but I love the openness and honesty. This sort of customer-relationship should be rewarded.

[emanuelescarsella]

As a software engineer I really liked the key points you choose about this topic, you kept it superficial enough to be understandable for everybody but still very accurate and comprehensive.
I also especially liked the transparency you had about AWS bills and active users numbers, many companies tend to keep that information secret to avoid revealing how little of their expenses actually goes to the physical infrastructure but you instead choose to point out how the real cost of such a business is software development, testing and the whole IT team.
Good job 🥰👍🏻

[MascletaTheFirst]

This kind of transparency and customer focused business ventures is always a nice breath of fresh air.

[jamessimon]

For those of us in our 40s, the existence of ubiquitous high quality streaming is nothing short of miraculous

[mahqueen]

Ayo? Im on my phone on the toilet rn 😭 why u gotta attack me like that not even 30 secs into the vid 😭

[hithere-czoc]

Hi! I’m an engineer at Meta and I work on the reverse / forward proxy (and some other supporting infra). Great video! The scale really is mind-boggling, including the physical infrastructure, the gigantic pieces of software orchestrated together, the fault-tolerance (and the speeds at which the global network shifts when things break in certain areas), the number of different clients implemented in different languages, the number of attack vectors we have to defend both proactively and reactively, and honestly just the sheer volume of traffic. If you ever don’t know what to do in engineering, get into network engineering!

[DomyTheMad]

if this was released by anyone but my single favorite engineering channel I wouldn't have even clicked on it.

[carpeinferi]

I have got to applaud you (and your team) on explaining this subject in an easily understood manner for the layman while still keeping the technical aspects correct; so often see accuracy suffer for sake of a lowest common denominator explanation.

[wesleykirkland]

Brian, this was very great! I'm a Devops Engineer at a global streaming company and a lot of this was VERY spot on. I'm surprised you we're able to go into this level of detail. I really liked your example of LG WebOs apps as I've had inquiries at work that I was reminded of when you mentioned it.

[richardjones]

It's amazing that a bunch of Youtubers have been able to put all this together. Keep up the good work. I signed up to Nebula via Curiosity Stream, but find I watch far more from Nebula. It's where the good stuff is!

[Showman]

This is the best engineering channel. You explain anything and everything with pictures and animations. In addition, if someone doesn't know anything about that topic, that person would still understand it. That happened to me all the time. Thanks

[theAessaya]

"Developer Operations" has caught me off-guard, lol. As someone in the tech space adjacent to Nebula's this is the first time I've heard someone refer to DevOps by the full term in years 😂
Great video, thanks for the explanations :)

[lpeabody]

This was an awesome video. It's got a real "we have arrived" vibe to it. Well presented. Thanks got the hard work, Nebula content is top-tier creative.

[gosnooky]

I'm a software engineer in the video space as well (live HLS streaming), so it was fun to watch how someone else explains how all this works. As a Nebula subscriber in Cambodia, I'm thankful your CDN network grew because when I first signed up, videos were slow and always buffered and dropped down to 480p and I thought about not renewing, but this isn't the case anymore. I'm very satisfied with the service overall.

[minxythemerciless]

The modems described did not use simple amplitude modulation - that was 1960s technology. the 56K modems used complex phase amplitude modulation to get a very high bit rate through 3 kHz bandwith phone line. Similar techniques are used on cable modems and digital TV broadcasts

[punditgi]

I work for a major high tech firm offering cloud services and I love the explanations in this video. I also like seeing the guy whose voice I've come to know and love. All the best to Nebula! ❤🎉😊

[benmcreynolds]

No matter how much i learn: The way we can send AND display video & audio WIRELESSLY.. Will always blow my mind! Just the fact how CRT TV's displayed images, how a dvd can take 0's & 1's and transfer it into a image is amazing. Even tho I'm a total nerd for anything science related, the science behind sending and displaying videos will always be amazing to me

[ffrige]

As a Professional Services Engineer with Keysight, I work with test equipment that emulates these video streams over a stand alone or non-stand alone 5G core network, and the way HLS/QUIC protocol stack works amazes me.

The neatest thing that HLS/QUIC does is adaptive bit rate streaming. When you initially start a stream on whatever streaming platform, you may notice low video quality, then after a while, it improves and goes to high resolution. Or in the middle of a stream, quality with the network degrades, then you see the picture goes from HD to low res, then improve after a while.

I can’t get my head wrapped around that. I mean I know how the function works in the sense on configuring the video stream on the Keysight test platform, configure multiple HLS streams in the tool so the streams can upshift and downshift as needed based on network conditions. I also configure a network impairment emulator to simulate degradations in the network to force the streams to downshift and upshift.

[Nixontheman]

The success of Nebula is built upon trust, the customers feel the respect and repay it with trust. This is priceless and must be maintained.
Thanks guys, great job

[altertopias]

Someone give the person who wrote this script a raise. Clear, interesting, and enticing. Love to see it.