I’m not sure buffering was the biggest issue with this event.
How was as 58 year old Tyson fighting a man in his 20s?
Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
581–590 of 986 posts
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 regul…
IVS does not scale past 1080p: https://ivs.rocks/
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#583What a massive blow to NFLX. They have been in the streaming game for years (survived COVID-19) and this silly exhibition match is what does them in?
I didn’t watch it live (boxing has lot its allure for me) but vicariously lived through it via social feed on Bluesky/Mastadon.
Billions of dollars at their disposal and they just can’t get it right. Probably laid off the highly paid engineers and teams that made their shit work.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have this argument a lot in tech. We should always be doing (the thing we want to do) Somme examples that always get me in trouble (or at least big heated conversations) 1. Always be building: It does not matter if code was not changed, or there has been no PRs or whatever, build it. Something in your org or infra has likely changed. My argument is "I would rather have a build failure on software that is already re…
This is great, but what possible counterargument is there? We should prolong indefinitely a spooky ambiguity about whether the system works or not?
In some environments, deploying to production has a massive bureaucracy tax. Paperwork, approvals, limited windows in time, can’t do them during normal business hours, etc.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#585Amazon prime streams the Thursday night NFL game and they seem to have no problem.
Isn't the scale a bit different though? Surely this event was an order of magnitude more concurrent viewers than some NFL game.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#586Not enough chaos monkey engineering.
There was some blog post on HN the other day where someone said they don't do chaos monkey anymore... Even then, how do you chaos test a novel event ahead of time?
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#587People just do not appreciate how many gotchas can pop up doing anything live. Sure, Netflix might have a great CDN that works great for their canned content and I could see how they might have assumed that's the hardest part. Live has changed over the years from large satellite dishes beaming to a geosat and back down to the broadcast center($$$$$), to microwave to a more local broadcast center($$$$), to running ded…
You are making excuses for a multibillion dollar company that has been in this game for many years. Maybe the first to market in streaming.
This isn’t NFLX’s first rodeo in live streaming. Have seen a handful of events pop up in their apps.
There is no excuse. All of the resources and talent at their disposal, and they looked absolutely amateurish. Poor optics.
I would be amazed if they are able to secure another exclusive contract like this in the future.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#588Netflix is good only on streaming ready made content, not live streaming, but; 1. Netflix is a 300B company, this isn't a resources issue. 2. This isn't the first time they have done live streaming at this scale either. They already have prior failure experience, you expect the 2nd time to be better, if not perfect. 3. There were plenty of time between first massive live streaming to second. Meaning plenty of time to…
The problem is that provisioning vast capacity for peak viewership is expensive and requires long-term commitment. Some providers won't give you more connectivity to their network unless you sign a 12 month deal where you prepay that.
Peak traffic is very expensive to run, because you're building capacity that will be empty/unsused when the event ends. Who'd pay for that? That's why it's tricky and that's why Akamai charges these insane prices for live streaming.
A "public" secret in that network layer is usually not redundant in your datacenter even if it's promised. To have redundant network you'd need to double your investment and it'll seat idle of at 50% max capacity. For 2hr downtime per year when you restart the high-capacity routers it's not cost efficient for most clients.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#589What a massive blow to NFLX. They have been in the streaming game for years (survived COVID-19) and this silly exhibition match is what does them in? I didn’t watch it live (boxing has lot its allure for me) but vicariously lived through it via social feed on Bluesky/Mastadon. Billions of dollars at their disposal and they just can’t get it right. Probably laid off the highly paid engineers and teams that made their…
> Probably laid off the highly paid engineers and teams that made their shit work.
More likely overpaying a bunch of posers without the chops, a victim of their own arrogance.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#590It’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
Netflix has 280m subscriber highly doubt half of them tuned in to watch the match, is that 130m figure official?