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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

#701

Post by grogenaut »

lizknope wrote: post #695

Does anyone remember IP multicast? I remember a lot of trade magazines in the late 1990's during the dot com boom talked about how important it would be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_multicast I never hear about it anymore. Is that because everyone wants to watch something different at their own time? Or is it actually working just fine now in the background? I see under the "Deployment" section it mentions IPTV…

dumbing it down a bit: Imagine if anyone in your neighborhood could broadcast video and take up %N of the bandwidth to all of the routers in the neighborhood. Imagine this on your campus or at your office. This works for cable tv, as there's only 200 channels. You're just going to slurp up all of the bandwidth instead and maybe no one is watching the tv.

Sure you get these black swan events that everyone wants to watch, but they're just that, really infrequent. So instead you have to provision capacity if on the interent to do big events like this. The upside is that you have a billion people able to point to point to another billion people instead of 30 companies who can send to everyone.

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

#702

Post by grogenaut »

This topic is really just fun for me to read based on where I work and my role.

Live is a lot harder than on demand especially when you can't estimate demand (which I'm sure this was hard to do). People are definitely not understanding that. Then there is that Netflix is well regarded for their engineering not quite to the point of snobbery.

What is actually interesting to me is that they went for an event like this which is very hard to predict as one of their first major forays into live, instead of something that's a lot easier to predict like a baseball game / NFL game.

I have to wonder if part of the NFL allowing Netflix to do the Christmas games was them proving out they could handle live streams at least a month before. The NFL seems to be quite particular (in a good way) about the quality of the delivery of their content so I wouldn't put it past them.

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

#703

Post by grogenaut »

shermantanktop wrote: post #698

Every time a big company screws up, there are two highly informed sets of people who are guaranteed to be lurking, but rarely post, in a thread like this: 1) those directly involved with the incident, or employees of the same company. They have too much to lose by circumventing the PR machine. 2) people at similar companies who operate similar systems with similar scale and risks. Those people know how hard this is a…

you are so right about that. tho I'm sure that many of the netflix folks are still doing their after action analysis in prep for Dec 25 NFL.

now take this realization and apply it to any news article or forum post you read and think about how uninformed they actually are.

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

#704

Post by dpkirchner »

shermantanktop wrote: post #698

Every time a big company screws up, there are two highly informed sets of people who are guaranteed to be lurking, but rarely post, in a thread like this: 1) those directly involved with the incident, or employees of the same company. They have too much to lose by circumventing the PR machine. 2) people at similar companies who operate similar systems with similar scale and risks. Those people know how hard this is a…

Right? A common complaint by outsiders is that Netflix uses microservices. I'd love to hear exactly how a monolith application is guaranteed to perform better, with details. What is the magic difference that would have ensured the live stream would have been successful?

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

#705

Post by shermantanktop »

namaria wrote: post #679
moralestapia wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it means that! You only need a big enough check.

No it doesn't. India has landed on Mars for a fraction of the cost it took other nations, and the ESA has never been able to pull it off. Not every cost is fungible and money isn't always the limiting factor.

It should be obvious that not all risks can be converted into a capital problem.

People say this, but then fall in love, get divorced, get depressed, or their company might lose its mojo, get sued, or lose an unreplaceable employee. But they will still say “all risk can be costed.”

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

#706

Post by karaterobot »

shermantanktop wrote: post #698

Every time a big company screws up, there are two highly informed sets of people who are guaranteed to be lurking, but rarely post, in a thread like this: 1) those directly involved with the incident, or employees of the same company. They have too much to lose by circumventing the PR machine. 2) people at similar companies who operate similar systems with similar scale and risks. Those people know how hard this is a…

The only time I worked on a project that had a live television launch, it absolutely tipped over within like 2 minutes, and people on HN and Reddit were making fun of it. And I know how hard everyone worked, and how competent they were, so I sympathize with the people in these cases. While the internet was teeing off with easy jokes, engineers were swarming on a problem that was just not resolving, PMs were pacing up and down the hallway, people were getting yelled at by leadership, etc. It's like taking all the stress and complexity of a product launch and multiplying it by 100. And the thing I'm talking about was just a website, not even a live video stream.

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

#707

Post by shermantanktop »

ikiris wrote: post #538
oehpr wrote: post #502

Earlier 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…

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.

At 120m concurrents? I’d be interested who can whitelabel that.

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

#708

Post by mvandermeulen »

prasadjoglekar wrote: post #553
mfiguiere wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Disney HotStar managed to stream ~60M livestreams for the Cricket world cup a year ago. The problem has been solved. Livestreaming sports just have a different QoS expectations than on demand. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-did-hotstar-managed-5-9-cr...

It’s possible I will never read a worse written article so completely devoid of any actual information. I wonder why they bothered writing it

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

#709

Post by [deleted] »

ilaksh wrote: post #687
throwaway106382 wrote: post #681

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.

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 w…

[deleted]

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

#710

Post by throwaway106382 »

ilaksh wrote: post #687
throwaway106382 wrote: post #681

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.

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 w…

hopefully their stock takes a big hit monday - these types only understand one thing
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