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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

#781

Post by miki123211 »

survirtual wrote: post #733
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…

For an event like this, there already exists an architecture that can handle boundless scale: torrents. If you code it to utilize high-bandwidth users upload, the service becomes more available as more users are watching -- not less available. It becomes less expensive with scale, more available, more stable. The be more specific, if you encode the video in blocks with each new block hash being broadcast across the n…

Then, instead of people complaining about buffering issues, you'd get people complaining about how the greedy capitalists at Netflix made poor Joe Shmoe use all of his data cap, because they made him upload lots of data to other users and couldn't be bothered to do it themselves.

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

#782

Post by yourapostasy »

skybrian wrote: post #644
mbrumlow wrote: post #559

Earlier 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…

Doing dry runs regularly makes sense, but whether actually shipping it makes sense seems context-dependent. It depends on how much you can minimize the side effects of shipping a release. Consider publishing a new version of a library: you'd be bumping the version number all the time and invalidating caches, causing downstream rebuilds, for little reason. Or if clients are lazy about updating, any two clients would b…

What I’m seeing in large organizations is tracking dependencies within a team’s scope is better than dependencies between teams, because so many developers between teams are punting on tracking dependencies upon other teams’ artifacts if there isn’t a formal system already in place at the organization to establish contracts between teams along these dependency routes, that automatically handle the state and notifications when changes announcing the intended state change are put through the system. Usually some haphazard dependency representation is embedded into some software and developers call it a day, expecting the software to auto-magically solve a social-technical logistical problem instead of realizing state transitions of the dependencies are not represented and the software could never deliver what they assume.

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

#783

Post by windexh8er »

nikau wrote: post #774
swyx wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what was the ultimate cause/fix of issues in your case? a database thing?

Insufficient testing

While that may be the case, the things like this I've experienced have been more along the lines of incompetent management.

In one case I was doing an upgrade on an IPTV distribution network for a cable provider (15+ years ago at this point). This particular segment of subscribers totalled more than 100k accounts. I did validation of the hardware and software rev installed on the routers in question prior to my trip to the data center (2+ hour drive). I informed management that the currently running version on the router wasn't compatible with this hardware rev of card I was upgrading to. I was told that it would in fact work, that we had that same combination of hw/sw running elsewhere. I couldn't find it when I went to go look at other sites. I mentioned it in email prior to leaving I was told to go.

Long story short, the card didn't work, had to back it out. The HA failover didn't work on the downgrade and took down all of those subscribers as the total outage caused a cascading issue with some other gear in this facility. All in all it was during off-peak time of day, but it was a waste of time and customer sat.

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

#784

Post by gscott »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #776
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 don’t belong to either group. What does this make you?

[dead]

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

#785

Post by conductr »

MBCook wrote: post #775
SoftTalker wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess my question is: why? "Cable boxes" are uniformly awful to use in my experience. The UI is clunky, they take up space and it's another remote and another tangle of wires to try to hide. What advantage do they offer in 2024?

> What advantage do they offer in 2024? Live news and sports is huge for a ton of people. You have access to all the shows from the major networks. You don’t need to subscribe to Peacock and Paramount and Hulu and the TBS app and Discovery+ and… Better yet, they’re all combined in one interface as opposed to all trying to be the only thing that you use. Also, especially if you grew up with it, there is absolutely a s…

This. I’m exactly in this YouTube tv camp and most the time just miss the simplicity of the old cable. Having to find things to watch is for me and awful experience. Then when I do want to watch something trying to figure out which app it’s actually on is awful. I think we subscribed to a dozen different things, it’s so damn fragmented. Even in early days if Netflix, I was a holdout that kept going to blockbuster because the UI of visually scanning a wall/shelf of DVDs was far superior to the Netflix version of the same IMO.

This is definitely turning into my version of an old man rant. “Back in my day…” the main benefit of it all is I actually just don’t watch as much as I once did. The friction is too high. Or, the commitment is too high-I dont usually want to jump into some 10 episode series.

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

#786

Post by david-gpu »

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…

Completely agreed. There are also former employees who have very educated opinions about what is likely going on, but between NDAs and whatnot there is only so much they are willing to say. It is frustrating for those in the know, but there are lines they can't or won't cross.

Whenever an HN thread covers subjects where I have direct professional experience I have to bite my tongue while people who have no clue can be as assertive and confidently incorrect as their ego allows them to be.

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

#787

Post by miki123211 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #723
cabinguy wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you know the answer to your questions is: of course they do. However, I’m in the same boat as you. The joke’s on us, I guess.

I guess my question is: why? "Cable boxes" are uniformly awful to use in my experience. The UI is clunky, they take up space and it's another remote and another tangle of wires to try to hide. What advantage do they offer in 2024?

From my experience? The ability to punch in a channel number (or not even that) and get something playing, instantly, without the need to make a choice.

For many people, often those with backgrounds that make them unlikely to frequent HN, the experience they're looking for is "1. get home, 2. open beer, 3. turn TV on, 4. watch."

The default state of a streaming app is to ask you what you want to watch, and then show you exactly the thing you selected. The default state of traditional TV is to show you something, and let you switch to something else if you can't stand the thing you're watching right now or have something specific in mind. Surprisingly, many people prefer the latter over the former.

The same applies to radio versus streaming, many family members of mine don't use streaming, because all it takes to turn on the radio is turning the key in the ignition, which they have to do anyway.

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

#788

Post by positr0n »

geor9e wrote: post #566
softwaredoug wrote: post #495

The 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.

They've been doing live events since 2023. But it's hard to be prepared for something that's never been done by anyone before — a superbowl scale event, entirely viewed over the internet. The superbowl gets to offload to cable and over the air. Interestingly, I didn't have any problems with my stream. So it sounds like the bandwidth problems might be localized, perhaps by data center or ISP.

I would guess the majority of the streamed bandwidth was sourced from boxes like these in ISP's points of presences around the globe: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

So I agree the problems could have been localized to unique (region, ISP) combinations.

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

#789

Post by positr0n »

DharmaPolice wrote: post #643
burntalmonds wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think people are incorrectly assuming that everyone had the same experience with the stream. I watched the whole thing and only had a few instances of buffering and quality degradation. Not more than 30 seconds total during the stream.

Even if it was only 30% of people had a problem that's still millions of unhappy users. Not great for a time sensitive event. Also, from lurking in various threads on the topic Netflix's in app messages added to people's irritation by suggesting that they check their WiFi/internet was working. Presumably that's the default error message but perhaps that could have been adjusted in advance somehow.

One of the times I reloaded the page I got a raw envoy error message!

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

#790

Post by j45 »

Streaming live can be a very different thing than on-demand.

Hopefully Netflix can share more about what they learned, I love learning about this stuff.

I had joked I would probably cancel Netflix after the fight.. since I realized other platforms seemed to have more content both old and new.

Then the video started stuttering.

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