Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like it's time for some popcorn.
Would you be so kind to pass some to me? Popcorn that is.
I would never risk suggesting people use the legal app popcorntime to pirate copyrighted material.
Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
281–290 of 763 posts
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#282I've been having major internet issues lately (Seattle area), have had 4 techs come try to figure it out. Yesterday's tech finally correctly diagnosed the problem as happening before the connection reaches our home but was unsure of the cause. He called his supervisor to investigate, and they found that the capacity for our neighborhood's node was nearly at 100%, while ideally it should always be under 80%. Fortunate…
If you didn't know, that 80% number is probably the result of Little's Law. That's the result where if your demand is generated by a Poisson process, and your service has a queue, 80% utilization of the service is where the probability of an infinite queue starts to get really high. People
Here's a nice blog post about the subject:
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/01/30/server-utilization...
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#283Maybe if we had kept using bittorrent for TV distribution we wouldn't have so much global traffic downloading "The Avengers" for the millionth time, you would just download it from the nearest host (also the way the internet worked before HTTPS, there used to be way more local caching of content being downloaded over and over again)
Except residential upload speeds are usually only 1/10th of the corresponding download speed.
Yeah, but my residential conncetion is 1000/100.
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#284Does it mean they’ll pay me back for the 4K package?
No, in the same way that you wouldn't expect a refund if you personally chose to use less than 4K for a stream. In this case Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, has made that downgrade choice for all Europeans.
> In this case Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, has made that downgrade choice for all Europeans.
They did not force Netflix to do it. Rather, they asked them.
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
The technical needlessness of this decision has been thoroughly reviewed in this thread; therefore this is just a fear-based decision because of the panic. Why should anyone tolerate pointless moves like this to appease people that are panicking?
I don't think it's a fear based decision, it would without a doubt reduce their costs considerably. Netflix runs on AWS and while they are paying a special rate they are still paying through the nose. Netflix is operating at a loss, has a mountain of debt and it's most profitable when people maintain their yearly sub and binge 1 show ever 2-3 months basically the same way gyms make their money you pay for a year, go…
Netflix is not serving streams through AWS. They use AWS for everything except serving streams. They're spending around 15 billion per year on content, bandwidth costs are far lower than that.
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#286I've been having major internet issues lately (Seattle area), have had 4 techs come try to figure it out. Yesterday's tech finally correctly diagnosed the problem as happening before the connection reaches our home but was unsure of the cause. He called his supervisor to investigate, and they found that the capacity for our neighborhood's node was nearly at 100%, while ideally it should always be under 80%. Fortunate…
Comcast's last mile network in Seattle has been struggling in some areas from the morning until around 4 to 5 PM. It's not massive loss, but enough to disrupt video conference. Run a mtr towards an Internet dest and you'll see loss at the first hop and everything behind it.
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's truly a good question - they could pull that data quickly and prorate people somehow. Maybe not for a bill already gone out, but perhaps going forward (even if they re-enable it). I'm not going to knock them for this, given that we're talking about keeping critical infrastructure from being overrun while the remainder of the economy works distributed.
You should not knock Netflix at all. The request came from the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services. Netflix helped out when they were asked to. If Europeans are upset about this decision they need to take it up with their elected officials not Netflix.
It was just a request. If any Netflix consumers have an issue with this they should take it with Netflix.
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#288Maybe if we had kept using bittorrent for TV distribution we wouldn't have so much global traffic downloading "The Avengers" for the millionth time, you would just download it from the nearest host (also the way the internet worked before HTTPS, there used to be way more local caching of content being downloaded over and over again)
Except residential upload speeds are usually only 1/10th of the corresponding download speed.
Maybe 10 years ago? I don't know anyone with a connection that badly asymmetrical.
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#289I've been having major internet issues lately (Seattle area), have had 4 techs come try to figure it out. Yesterday's tech finally correctly diagnosed the problem as happening before the connection reaches our home but was unsure of the cause. He called his supervisor to investigate, and they found that the capacity for our neighborhood's node was nearly at 100%, while ideally it should always be under 80%. Fortunate…
I’ve worked at a major ISP, for a decade, and spotting something like this should be so easy to spot. There are tools on monitoring of load all the time, and areas are routibely getting split etc. to improve bandwith, so I think your ISP are basicly amateurs..
Alternatively, load has gone up across the board in a short period of time, so that preventive scaling has fallen behind and are in recovery mode.
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#290A few months ago there was blog post posted here from a guy making movie reviews. In the blog post he described how he managed to get 4k Netflix screenshots on his Chromecast. The effort he made was enormous and involved reverse engineering the Netflix data protocol (I probably worded this wrong). When doing that he found out that Netflix streaming in 4k isn't actually 4k. Again not exactly sure how this worked but t…
It looks like he didn't reverse-engineer the Netflix data protocol. What he did is use a HDCP-stripper box to get access to a raw decoded HDMI signal. The HDCP-stripper also had a screenshot function which he used to get snapshots of the video he was playing.
He also monitored how much network traffic was being used while playing Netflix videos to get an estimate of the bitrate that was being played. The 4K videos were consistently around 18Mbps, which is reasonable.
FWIW, you can (normally) get a HDCP stripper from AliExpress for $10. This isn't particularly exotic hardware.