It could very well be a problem with the law. Just want to say that up front so I don't get accused of saying it isn't.

But: I worked in a data center for nigh on a year, and migrating to new hardware can take a LONG time, even if you're doing the upgrade in-place in the same lab. It took a team of four guys nearly a week and a half to upgrade 20 racks worth of equipment. You've got to power down the machine, yank the drives, yank the cabling, uninstall each server/controller/enclosure (sometimes a 2-man job. It depends on what you're pulling. Something like a PowerEdge M1000E definitely needs multiple people, but an SC7020 is easy to do by yourself), install the new ones, populate them with drives, re-cable the entire thing, and then do software configuration/installation to get everything working the way you want it. It's not really a trivial process.

Now, that's assuming they were doing an in-place upgrade and were hosting everything themselves. More than likely they host their site in some other company's server farm, so a hardware upgrade either requires that company to do an in-place upgrade, to migrate their data to other locations in the farm, or a combination of both.

And the final upgrade option I can think of is them actually switching hosting companies, and needing to transfer all of their data (likely petabytes, due to the sheer number of shows and movies they have) to the new location. The cheapest and most likely route they would have taken for that would be copying it over the net. Even assuming they could get several gigabits per second out and back in, that's still going to take a long time, given that the receiving side has to write all of that incoming data to hard disks (there's no way they can afford all-flash arrays for that much data) and then likely duplicate it (I can't imagine they aren't running some form of RAID. That would just be irresponsible). This would take even longer than a physical, in-place upgrade.

Like I said, it could very well be a legal problem; but we can't dismiss the idea outright that they could be performing some sort of massive upgrade or migration to handle more load.