It's incomprehensible to me that Netflix, one of the most highly skilled engineering teams in the world - completely sh*t the bed last night and provided a nearly unwatchable experience that was not even in the same league as pre-internet live broadcast from 30 years ago.
Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
681–690 of 986 posts
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#682Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 exc…
Sorry for the off topic but what’s this thing that I only come across in Hacker News about referring to a company by their stock exchange name (APPL, MSFT, etc) outside of a stock context? It seems really weird to me.
As a counterpoint to some other replies, I do this sometimes, not thinking at all about stocks but instead as a standardized abbreviation of sorts. Ms for example can mean tons of things from a title to multiple sclerosis to milliseconds. MSFT is clear and half the length.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#683Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#684People 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…
Is multicast a thing on the commercial internet? Seems like that could help.
If commercial = public, then no - you can not use multicast for this. It is heavily used within some enterprise networks though like if you go to a gym with lots of TVs they are all likely on multicast
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#685Earlier 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
Perhaps it was, or perhaps it was not.
I was watching a pirated, live retransmission of the event on Twitch (in Portuguese), and there was zero buffering on my end.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-...
The Games Awards claims to have 118 million livestreams [1], and went off without a hitch. I watched it for the game trailers, actually shocked that it's also superbowl viewership territory. https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/game-awards-2023-break...
"The festivities were streamed live from the Peacock Theater in L.A. across more than 30 platforms including YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, TikTok Live, X (Twitter), Steam, WeChat, Bilibili, Huya, DouYu, Xiaohongshu and Instagram Live"
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#687It's incomprehensible to me that Netflix, one of the most highly skilled engineering teams in the world - completely sh*t the bed last night and provided a nearly unwatchable experience that was not even in the same league as pre-internet live broadcast from 30 years ago.
My bet is that a technical manager told his executive (multiple times) that he needed more resources and engineering time to make live work properly, and they just told him to make do because they didn't want to spend the money.
It could come down to something as stupid as:
Executive: "we handled [on demand show ABCD] on day one, that was XX million"
Engineering: "live is really different"
Executive: (arguing about why it shouldn't be that different and should not need a lot of new infrastructure)
Engineering: (can't really argue with his boss about this anymore after having repeated the same conversation 3 or 4 times) -- tells the team: we are not getting new servers or time for a new project. We have to just make do with what we have. You guys are brilliant, I know you can do it!"
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#688The 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.
that’s difficult to reproduce at scale; there are only so many “super bowl” events in a calendar year
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#689Earlier 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…
> 1. Always be building: It does not matter if code was not changed... > 2. Always be releasing... A good argument for this is security. Whatever libraries/dependencies you have, unpin the versions, and have good unit tests. Security vulnerabilities that are getting fixed upstream must be released. You cannot fix and remove those vulnerabilities unless you are doing regular releases. This in turn also implies having…
> Whatever libraries/dependencies you have, unpin the versions, and have good unit tests.
Nitpick: unit tests by definition should not be exercising dependencies outside the unit boundary. What you want are solid integration and system tests for that.
Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which has many interesting facets worthy of discussion! No need to be extremely aggressive in your tone.
You are the one telling people their comments provide no value. That’s far more aggressive than using a word not even directed at you
How could that possibly be aggressive? It's not a personal indictment. Tone however, matters in any context.
I hope you find it within yourself to treat strangers nicer.