491–500 of 986 posts
I'm an engineering manager at a Fortune 500 company. The dumbest engineer on our team left for Netflix. He got a pay raise too. Our engineers are fucking morons. And this guy was the dumbest of the bunch. If you think Netflix hires top tier talent, you don't know Netflix.
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You've never worked in a startup have you? Or any business for that matter. You have to promise something first, then build it.
No joke, is this actually true? Do startups really do this? I thought the capability is built or nearly built or at least in testing already with reasonable or amazing results, THEN they go to market? Do startups go to other startups, fortune 500 companies and public companies to make false promises with or without due diligence and sign deals with the knowledge that the team and engineers know the product doesn't ha…
Next thing you know it's 9pm on a Sunday night and your desperately trying to ship a build for a client.
Netflix isn't some scrappy company though. If I had to guess they threw money at the problem.
A much better approach would of been to slowly scale over the course of a year. Maybe stream some college basketball games first, slowly picking more popular events to get some real prod experience.
Instead this is like their 3rd or 4th live stream ever. Even a pre show a week before would of allowed for greater testing.
I'm not a CTO of a billion dollar company though. I'm just an IC who's seen a few sites go down underload.
To be fair no one knows how it's going to go before it happens. It would of been more surprising for them to pull this off without issues... It's a matter of managing those issues. I know if I had paid 30$ for a Netflix subscription to watch this specific event I'd assume I got ripped off.
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This is the whole point of chaos engineering that was invented at Netflix, which tests the resiliency of these systems. I guess we now know the limits of what "at scale" is for Netflix's live-streaming solution. They shouldn't be failing at scale on a huge stage like this. I look forward to reading the post mortem about this.
Everyone keeps mentioning at scale. I seriously doubt this was an "at scale" problem. I have strong suspicion this was a failure at the origination point being able to push a stable signal. That is not an "at scale" issue, but a hubris of we can do better/cheaper than broadcasting standard practices
When you step back and look at the situation, it's not hard to see why Netflix dropped the ball here. Here's now I see it (not affiliated with Netflix, pure speculation): - Months ago, the "higher ups" at Netflix struck a deal to stream the fight on Netflix. The exec that signed the deal was probably over the moon because it would get Netflix into a brand new space and bring in large audience numbers. Along the way t…
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Is it really that big a deal if you are watching a few minutes behind? I've watched ball games on streaming networks where I can also hear a local radio broadcast, and the stream is always delayed compared to the radio, sometimes by quite a lot. But you'd never know it if you were just watching the stream.
Potentially more so in this brave new world of increased sports betting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sting Offshore combined streaming and betting houses will be cleaning up the rubes.
I thought Netflix’s biggest advantage was the quality/salary of its engineers. I think that every time I wait for Paramount+ to restart after its gone black in picture on picture, and yet, I’n still on Paramount+ and not Netflix, so maybe that advantage isn’t real.
Sigh, none of the competitors are much better. Disney, who has more than enough cash to throw at streaming, is a near constant hassle for us ( after 3 or more episodes it throws an inscrutable error on Playstation ). I would drop it, but this is the only remaining streaming service and wife is not willing to drop it ( I guess until 1 it is one error per one episode ).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've never worked in a startup have you? Or any business for that matter. You have to promise something first, then build it.
No joke, is this actually true? Do startups really do this? I thought the capability is built or nearly built or at least in testing already with reasonable or amazing results, THEN they go to market? Do startups go to other startups, fortune 500 companies and public companies to make false promises with or without due diligence and sign deals with the knowledge that the team and engineers know the product doesn't ha…
In the enterprise sector this is rampant. Companies sell "platforms" and those missing features are supposed to be implemented by consultants after the sale. This means the buyer is the one footing the bill for the time spent, and suffering with the delays.
Everyone here talking like this something unique netflix had to deal with. Hotstar live streamed india va Pakistan cricket match with zero issues with all time high live viewership ever in the history of live telecast. Why would viewers paying $20 month want to think about their technical issues, they dropped the ball pure and simple. Tech already exists for this, it’s been done before even by espn, nothing new here.
Rolling Stone reported 120m for Tyson and Paul on Netflix [1].
These are very different numbers. 120m is Super Bowl territory. Could Hotstar handle 3-4 of those cricket matches at the same time without issue?
[0] https://www.the-independent.com/sport/cricket/india-pakistan...
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/jake-paul-...
I had some technical experience with live video streaming over 15 years ago. It was a nightmare back then. I guess live video is still difficult in 2024. But congrats to Jake Paul and boxing fans. It was a great event. And breaking the internet just adds more hype for the next one.