Serves Netflix right for killing my beloved DVD rentals.
Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
531–540 of 986 posts
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a ridiculous statement. PrimeVideo is the leader in terms of sports events streaming over internet and it is composed of hundreds of microservices. Live streaming is just much harder than streaming, and it takes a years of work and a huge headcount to get something good.
Prime famously undid some amount of their microservices recently because it couldn’t keep up, and was hideously expensive.
This comment shows how a very random blog about a very small part of a product can dominate all conversation about it. Prime video famously did not undo anything. Out of 100+ teams one team undid one service. But somehow similar comments are common on HN. I am making no judgement or microservice or not just on this particular comment.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Saying live-streaming is a solved problem is like saying search is a solved problem It is. You can hire the people who have solved it to do it for you.
> It is. You can hire the people who have solved it to do it for you. "GPGPU compute is a solved problem if you buy Nvidia hardware" type comment
> "GPGPU compute is a solved problem if you buy Nvidia hardware" type comment
You're replacing the word hire with buy. That misconstrues the comment. If you need to do GPGPU compute and have never done it, you work with a team that has. (And if you want to build it in house, you scale to it.)
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#534It’s insane the excuses being made here for Netflix’s apparently unique circumstances. They failed. Full stop. There is no valid technical reason they couldn’t have had a smooth experience. There are numerous people with experience building these systems they could have hired and listened to. It isn’t a novel problem. Here are the other companies that are peers that livestream just fine, ignoring traditional broadcas…
Amazon had their fair share of livestream failures and for notably less viewers. I don't think they deserve a spot on that list. I briefly worked in streaming media for sports and while it's not a novel problem, there are so many moving parts and points of failure that it can easily all go badly.
There is no one "Amazon" here, there are at least 3:
* Twitch: Essentially invented live streaming. Fantastic.
* Amazon Interactive Video Service [0]: Essentially "Twitch As A Service", built by Twitch engineers. Fantastic.
* Prime Video. Same exact situation as Netflix: original expertise is all in static content. Lots of growing pains with live video and poor reports. But they've figured it out: now there are regular live streams (NHL and NFL), and other channel providers do live streaming on Prime Video as a distribution platform.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look. I'm a small startup employee. I have a teeny tiny perspective here. But frankly speaking the idea that Netflix could just take some off the shelf widget and stuff it in their network to solve a problem... It's an absurd statement for even me. And if there's anyone it should apply to it would be a little startup company that needs to focus on their core area. Every off the shelf component on the market needs ins…
> the idea that Netflix could just take some off the shelf widget and stuff it in their network to solve a problem Right. They have to hire one of the companies that does this. Each of YouTube, Twitch (Amazon), Facebook and TikTok have, I believe, handled 10+ million streams. The last two don't compete with Netflix.
I believe this is the spirit of the "solved problem" comment: not that the solution is an off-the-shelf widget, but that if it has ever been solved, then that solution could technically be used again, even if organizing the right people is exorbitantly expensive.
Offering it for sale != having solved it.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
Illegal options also have lot less resources (revenue, service providers who are willing host/facilitate illegal activities, and so on) so it’s a fair comparison in my opinion.
> service providers who are willing host/facilitate illegal activities At least for NFL pirate streams, it seems they tend to use "burner" tenants from Azure and AWS. Of course they get shut down, but how hard is it to spin up another one?
They still have to put it behind a privacy-friendly proxy to hide their IP address from litigators right?
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
As counterpoint, I observed 2-3 drops in bitrate, but an otherwise fine experience. So the problem seems to have been in dissemination, not at the origin.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
Livestreaming is a solved problem. This sounds like NIH [1]. (At the very least, hire them as a back-up.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here
Look. I'm a small startup employee. I have a teeny tiny perspective here. But frankly speaking the idea that Netflix could just take some off the shelf widget and stuff it in their network to solve a problem... It's an absurd statement for even me. And if there's anyone it should apply to it would be a little startup company that needs to focus on their core area. Every off the shelf component on the market needs ins…
There are multiple companies that offer this capability today that would take a few weeks to hide behind company branding. This was a problem of netflix just not being set up for live stream but thinking they could handle it.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#539It’s insane the excuses being made here for Netflix’s apparently unique circumstances. They failed. Full stop. There is no valid technical reason they couldn’t have had a smooth experience. There are numerous people with experience building these systems they could have hired and listened to. It isn’t a novel problem. Here are the other companies that are peers that livestream just fine, ignoring traditional broadcas…
it could be that they made use of the same advice X followed :)
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#540The way to deal with this is to constantly do live events, and actually build organizational muscle. Not these massive one off events in an area the tech team has no experience in.
Agreed. This is a management failure, full stop. Unbelievable that they'd expect engineering to handle a single Livestream event of this magnitude.