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Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

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Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#541

Post by moralestapia »

talldayo wrote: post #521
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #507

Earlier 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"

Which is valid? If your problem can be solved by writing a check, then it's the easiest problem to have on the planet.

Netflix didn't have to put out 3 PhD dissertations on how to improve the SOTA of live streaming, they only needed to reliably broadcast a fight for a couple hours.

That is a solved problem.

Amazon and Cloudflare do that for you as a service(!). Twitch and YouTube do it literally every day. Even X started doing it recently so.

No excuses for Netflix, tbh.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#542

Post by mikeryan »

ctvo wrote: post #510

It’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…

The big difference of all the examples you’ve mentioned is dedicated full-time crews on the ground where the events are produced.

I’m pretty confident that when the post mortem is done the issues are going to be way closer to the broadcast truck than the user.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#543

Post by dilyevsky »

al_borland wrote: post #499
cryptozeus wrote: post #447

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.

The Independent reports 35m viewers of that cricket match [0]. 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-...

Majority of superbowl viewers watch it on cable. Streaming gets fewer than 10M concurrents

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#544

Post by mfiguiere »

ctvo wrote: post #510

It’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…

The examples given here are not on the same scale. The numbers known so far:

- 120m viewers [1]

- Entire Netflix CDN Traffic grew 4x when the live stream started [2]

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/jake-paul-...

[2] https://x.com/DougMadory/status/1857634875257294866

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#545

Post by BLKNSLVR »

dh2022 wrote: post #309
freditup wrote: post #8

I wonder if there will be any long term reputational repercussions for Netflix because of this. Amongst SWEs, Netflix is known for hiring the best people and their streaming service normally seems very solid. Other streaming services have definitely caught up a bit and are much more reliable then in the early days, but my impression still has always been that Netflix is a step above the rest technically. This sure do…

I think why I will remember about this fight is not the (small) streaming issue I encountered as much as the poor quality of the fight itself. For me that was the reputational loss. Netflix was touting “NFL is coming to Netflix”. This fight did not really make me want to watch that.

I don't care about boxing or UFC or the grade-A douchebags that are the Paul brothers, but I tuned in just because I had the time and a Netflix subscription.

It was actually great that the fight itself was so boring because it justifies never having to spend time / money on that kind of bullshit. It was a farce. A very bright, loud, sparkly, and expensive (for some people) farce.

The value I got from it was the knowledge that missing out on that kind of thing isn't really missing out on anything at all.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#546

Post by that_guy_iain »

jonlucc wrote: post #523
that_guy_iain wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have the NFL next month on Christmas day. So that'll be a big streaming session but I think it'll be nothing compared to this. Even Twitter was having problems handling the live pirate streams there.

> Even Twitter was having problems Is that a surprise? They're not who I would think of first as a gold standard for high viewership live streams.

Well, considering it was multiple small streams I would expect them to keep them up. No have their entire streaming service have issues.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#547

Post by toast0 »

ctvo wrote: post #510

It’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…

I don't disagree that Netflix could have / should have done better. But everybody screws these things up. Even broadcast TV screws these things up.

Live events are difficult.

I'll also add on, that the other things you've listed are generally multiple simultaneous events; when 100M people are watching the same thing at the same time, they all need a lot more bitrate at the same time when there's a smoke effect as Tyson is walking into the ring; so it gets mushy for everyone. IMHO, someone on the event production staff should have an eye for what effects won't compress well and try to steer away from those, but that might not be realistic.

I did get an audio dropout at that point that didn't self correct, which is definitely a should have done better.

I also had a couple of frames of block color content here and there in the penultimate bout. I've seen this kind of stuff on lots of hockey broadcasts (streams or ota), and I wish it wouldn't happen... I didn't notice anything like that in the main event though.

Experience would likely be worse if there were significant bandwidth constraints between Netflix and your player, of course. I'd love to see a report from Netflix about what they noticed / what they did to try to avoid those, but there's a lot outside Netflix's control there.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#548

Post by mmooss »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #516
ctvo wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That’s uncharitable. Proposing reasons for institutional failure and discussing those can be ways for humans to improve communication and said challenges.

It's a way to mislead people into misunderstanding reality and therefore solving the wrong problems, often causing harm, now and in the future.

That's why serious analysis requires a factual basis, such as science, law, and good engineering and management. You need analytics data to figure out where the performance and organizational bottlenecks are.

Before people tried to understand illness with a factual basis, they wrote speculative essays on leeching and finding 'better' ways to do it.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#550

Post by mmooss »

tiluha wrote: post #466
phyrex wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale changes everything, I don't think it's fair to shrug this off

This is true, but scale comes after production. Once you have the video encoded on a server with a stable connection the hard part is over. What netflix failed to do is spread the files to enough servers around the globe to handle the load. I'm surprised they were unable(?) to use their network of edge servers to handle the live stream. Just run the stream with a 10 second delay and in that time push the stream segme…

> Once you have the video encoded on a server with a stable connection the hard part is over.

The hard part is over, and people new to the problem think they are almost done, but then the next part turns out to be 100x harder.

Lots of people can encode a video.

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