TL;DR

Netflix rebuilt the system that turns source video into the streams members play. The new pipeline runs on Cosmos, a microservice platform, instead of the older monolithic path they called Reloaded. Separate services own pieces such as complexity analysis and the bitrate ladder, so encoding recipes can change without a single release of the whole pipeline.

Why it matters

Video encoding is both a research loop (better ladders, new codecs) and a production factory (every title, every partner). A monolith couples those. Splitting them let the encoding team ship experiments faster and finish moving traffic off Reloaded in September 2023. The post is the overview; later posts in the series go service by service.

Key takeaways

• Cosmos is the next platform. Reloaded is the system it replaced, and the two ran side by side during the migration.
• Complexity analysis and ladder generation are separate services. The ladder service reads complexity data and writes encoding recipes.
• That split is how per-title and per-shot encoding ideas stay editable without rewriting capture and bookkeeping.
• The switchover of necessary functionality completed in September 2023, after years of parallel operation.
• This post is the map. The Video Encoding Service writeup is the next, deeper chapter.