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Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

highscalability.com

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Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#81

Post by soundwave106 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #42
raverbashing wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your money isn't going to the people who created the content Patently false and easily verifiable.

How about "isn't primarily going ...". Media is an investment, which is why were getting lots of "low creativity" movies, re-boots, extended franchises, sequels, etc.. People will risk money for art, but investors don't want to risk anything: some franchises can basically churn out anything and be sure to make a huge profit (which Hollywood accountants can spin as a loss by charging millions for IPR). I think the spi…

What is also true though is that The Pirate Bay or Megaupload are about as poor of a choice for content creators as it gets. As far as I know, the amount of money The Pirate Bay and Megaupload have paid content creators is diddly squat, and the amount of original programming produced by these two places is zero.

There are certainly reasons for not liking DRM, but "freedom to pirate" seems like a pretty poor one.

You are right about investors retreating to "safe low creativity", especially in times of downturn. Traditional movie theaters are in decline, so of course traditional cinema is playing it safe for now with reboots and sequels. Netflix, on the other hand, is more awash in investor cash... so at the moment, they are able to take greater risks.

As far as cutting out the "investor" side goes, it would be interesting to see a content host that is explicitly non-profit. Beyond major content hosts, I think the Soundclouds / Bandcamps / Patreons etc. definitely have their place, and have been helpful for some not-so-commercial / hobbyist artists. Even these platforms however seem to struggle with the conflict between making a profit vs serving the artistic community sometimes.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#82

Post by sandworm101 »

jedberg wrote: post #2

> I pulled this chapter together from dozens of sources that were at times somewhat contradictory. Facts on the ground change over time and depend who is telling the story and what audience they're addressing. You know old time journalists had a solution to this. Interviewing subjects with first hand knowledge. I know I rag on highscalability a lot, but I feel like they deserve it. They've written multiple articles a…

Try writing tech articles for money. You have to produce them quickly and to point. Interviewing people takes time. By the time the subject recieves the request and gets permission to talk to the reporter, the dealine has passed. An interview might also overturn the theme of the article, a theme dictated by a manager/purchaser based on thier brief reading of a few other articles/blogs. If the reporter wants to be paid they better generate the story as requested and on time. It isnt good jounalism but it is how you make rent.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#83

Post by katastic »

jedberg wrote: post #2

> I pulled this chapter together from dozens of sources that were at times somewhat contradictory. Facts on the ground change over time and depend who is telling the story and what audience they're addressing. You know old time journalists had a solution to this. Interviewing subjects with first hand knowledge. I know I rag on highscalability a lot, but I feel like they deserve it. They've written multiple articles a…

I've actually heard a lot of people say this. At least a couple Ph.Ds, though I can't recall the links.

How many failures in journalism are attributed to "lazy journalism" where nobody will even leave the building these days to even ask someone involved in the story or topic. How the internet made it "easier" but they've become so over-reliant on it that many journalists fail to include information that isn't already online.

Then again, Netflix is probably a phone call away, so that may be a whole 'nother level of lack-of-followup.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#84

Post by tlholaday »

jordache wrote: post #48
tlholaday wrote: post #47

Author uses acronym CDN without first defining it. Explain Like I Do Not Already Know What You Are Explaining.

that article is pretty technical, beyond the level of technicality of simply knowing what a CDN is.

I red-circle the style-guide violating unexplained CDN acronym because the author titled the work from which this is excerpted “Explain Like I’m 10.” I have no objection to using terms-of-art in articles written for experts.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#85

Post by curun1r »

> The advantage of having three regions is that any one region can fail, and the other regions will step in handle all the members in the failed region.

At a previous employer, we met with AWS engineers who told us that this sort of thinking wasn't correct. Availability zones are for failure tolerance. Regions are conceptually different and for things like moving compute closer to clients, mitigating political instability or ensuring that data is held in a certain jurisdiction. To back up that claim, they told us that amazon.com ran out of a single region, us-west-2.

As an aside, another interesting point from that meeting was that autoscaling wasn't a good strategy for scaling up in the event of the loss of an availability zone. The reason why is that in those scenarios, a lot of other customers will be trying to fail over as well and autoscaling can get very slow. Instead of autoscaling, they recommended that we run 150% of our per-AZ capacity in 3 AZs so that if an AZ went offline, the remaining two would already have the necessary capacity. We still used autoscaling, but it was for responding to spikes and troughs in our own load, not failure scenarios.

I'm curious whether these two observations are correct since it seems like a lot of people view regions and autoscaling through a failure-recovery lens.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#86

Post by forgotpassagan »

I love how Netflix is so open about their architecture, but I have one strong criticism.

After trying to get Spinnaker running, which is like 10 services for a fairly straightforward application, and reading about how Netflix has Cron jobs running to 'clean up' data inconsistencies... I started to think Google has a better approach to scaling the code.

Netflix is strong on eventual consistency, and making services as small as possible. Having tried to build something in that image, holy shit the issue of distributed transactions becomes a nightmare.

We had to build error handling in everything to handle the failure of everything else. Maybe half our code was 'just in case' to deal with exploding failure scenario complexity during service call fanout. If your service calls out to two or more services that also do data updates, God help you. There's no call ordering or way to make sure both succeed or fail, so if one does you could easily end up in an invalid state.

Contrast this to Google's approach. Maps is one service, Docs is one service. Their service boundaries are much larger so they can shove the complexity of consistency and rollbacks back into the DB where it belongs. And they avoid eventual consistency as much as possible.

If Google can make these big 'monoliths' work at huge scale I don't see any advantage to 'microservices', it's just a bunch of pointless overhead. I think Netflix has had a little too much industry koolaid ...

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#87

Post by izacus »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #64
jmiserez wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it browser limitations, or just DRM limitations? Youtube seems to do 4K just fine.

I think it has to do with HEVC h.265 codec & HW acceleration support available to the browser in the respective platforms. https://caniuse.com/#feat=hevc Not sure why Chrome doesn't support HW for it though albeit Chrome OS. My Celeron N3060 Chromebook can decode it. I read Netflix has started using VP9 for streaming, newer CPU's have VP9 decoders in them.

No it's actually a DRM limitation. You're not allowed to watch high definition content of your platform doesn't support latest Widewine DRM even if you have the HW or SW decoding capability.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#88

Post by izacus »

synotna wrote: post #24
Walf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And content creators have the freedom to choose where they distribute content, many of whom choose Netflix.

Correct, so passively aggressively complaining about DRM is a moot point

It's what customers do in free market to get better service.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#89

Post by Jaruzel »

maxsilver wrote: post #76
ashark wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve hated it since pressing play stopped being necessary to start video playing. Now I have to keep the focus bouncing around or else whatever it’s currently on will start yelling at me. Can’t just stop and look around at what’s on screen. It’s stressful. [EDIT] in fact, now that I think about it, I almost never just browse the catalogue anymore, while I used to a lot. I open it and go to search ASAP, then close it…

Yes. And it gets worse -- I really hate the new "fake auto-play". On our Roku, if you sit on a movie or show for just a few seconds, Netflix starts auto-playing a video. But it's not the real show anymore, it's a weird custom-Netflix-made background advertisement for the show using random clips set to odd royalty-free stock music that is specifically not from the show/movie you are actually on and doesn't match. It k…

On our PS4 the auto-fake-video thingy runs and is SO annoying, but on our Amazon Fire Box, inside the Netflix app, it doesn't play them, you just get a static image. I assume it's down to the horsepower of the relevant client device.

Re: Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

#90

Post by PuffinBlue »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #51
Walf wrote: post #17

I know what it does when I don't press play: fills my memory with a boatload of bloated interface that has the shittiest navigation of any media player I've ever used. And I still can't just view a list of all series/movies by date.

Amazon's UI on the fire stick is so much worse.

I'm not sure about that really. It's like bashing your shin against a coffee table vs walking into a lamppost. Both painful experiences in their own unique ways.
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