Syntax and Semantic

Introduction One of the few reliable things that didn't crumble under the pressure of quarantining and working from home is our digital infrastructure. It remains largely unaffected as we conduct most of our business activities online. This is no accident. It is the result of 40+ years of continuous research to make that infrastructure faster, cheaper, and more reliable. My goal writing this series is to shed some light on the different hidden aspects of our digital infrastructure. In doing so, I hope that I will help the reader get a behind the scene's view of what we take for granted when we are watching HD videos, buying our groceries online, and chatting online with people on the other side of the planet.  A typical Internet user pays for their Internet and online services (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, iCloud) with some expectations of the quality of experience they will receive. Users also expect that the way they interact with the digital world will keep improving. Th...

If you ask "how do I get a video from Netflix to my TV screen?" you will probably get a variety of answers depending on whom you ask. Here are a TL;DR of the answers you are most likely to get: the home setting answer "your access point gets the video from the Netflix over the Internet and sends it over wifi to your TV"  the smart apps and video encoding answer "the Netflix app creates an HTTP request specifying your account and some chunks of the video you are about to watch and the Netflix server replies with HTTP responses that contain the chunks" the Internet Protocol (IP) answer "your smart TV creates packets addressed to the Netflix server by its IP address. Based on the IP address, the packets are first sent to the access point which sends it over fiber or telephone landlines to the Internet Service Provider (ISP), like AT&T, the ISP then sends it to other networks which eventually deliver it to Netflix (the ISP can also directly deliv...