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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

#811

Post by eviks »

oarsinsync wrote: post #680
Xenoamorphous wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing APPL instead of Apple doesn’t get you any fewer keystrokes.

Technically it’s one fewer keystroke (and it’s AAPL). It’s a lot fewer keystrokes for MS (Morgan Stanley), GS (Goldman Sachs) and MSFT (Microsoft) than it is for AAPL, but it’s a force of habit for some. Once you’re used to referring to firms by their ticker symbols, you do it all the time. E.g. an ex trader friend still says “spot” instead of “point” when referring to decimal points, even if talking in other context…

Technically, you forgot capitalization, so it's more keystrokes

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

#812

Post by latortuga »

chupchap wrote: post #799

Live streaming is hard. Most companies that do live streaming at 2024 scale did it by learning from their mistakes. This is true for Hotstar, Amazon and even Youtube. Netflix stack is made to stream optimised, compressed , cached videos with a manageable concurrent viewers for the same video. Here we had ~65m concurrent viewers in their first live event. The compression they use, distribution etc have not scaled up w…

I don't think this is their first live event. They have hosted a pro golf promotional match and they had a live pro tennis match between Nadal and Alcaraz off the top of my head.

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

#813

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

conductr wrote: post #785
MBCook wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bec…

I've certainly listened to some fascinating documentaries on BBC Radio 4 on subjects which it would never have occurred to me to seek out. There's definitely some advantages to linear broadcast.

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

#814

Post by shermantanktop »

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?

You may have belonged to one of those groups in the past, or maybe you will someday. I certainly have. Many of the more seasoned folks on HN have.

Stuff goes wrong, random internet people jump on the opportunity to speculate and say wildly off-the-mark comments, and the engineers trying to keep the ship from sinking have to sit quietly for fear of making the PR backlash worse.

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

#815

Post by eviks »

SilasX wrote: post #640
Xenoamorphous wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing APPL instead of Apple doesn’t get you any fewer keystrokes.

Ugh. Similar (huge) pet peeve about people who say "n.B." instead of "note".

But it's "note well", not just "note"

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

#816

Post by shermantanktop »

croes wrote: post #795
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 basically saying, everybody who criticizes Netflix now has no clue. That’s a bold claim given that people with inside knowledge could post here without disclosing they are insiders. Is that some kind of No True Scotsman?

I’m just pointing out that there are Netflix engineers reading all these words.

For every thread like this, there are likely people who are readers but cannot be writers, even though they know a lot. That means the active posters exclude that group, by definition.

These threads often have interesting and insightful comments, so that’s cool.

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

#817

Post by leptons »

lxgr wrote: post #762
leptons wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have done a dry run. They could have spun up a million virtual machines somewhere, and tested their video delivery for 30 minutes. Even my small team spins up 10,000 EC2 instances on the regular. Netflix has the money to do much more. I'm sure there are a dozen ways they could have stress-tested this beforehand. It's not like someone sprang this on them last week and they had to scramble to put together a…

How representative is an EC2 instance in a datacenter simulating user behavior really, though? These would likely have completely different network connectivity and usage patterns, especially if they don't have historical data distributions to draw from because this was their first big live event.

>How representative is an EC2 instance in a datacenter simulating user behavior really, though?

Systemic issues causing widespread buffering isn't "user behavior". It's a problem with how Netflix is trying to distribute video. Sure some connections aren't up to the task, and that isn't something Netflix can really control unless they are looking to improve how their player falls-back to lower bitrate video, which could also be tested.

>because this was their first big live event.

That's the point of testing. They should have already had a "big live event" that nobody paid for during automated testing. Instead they seem to have trusted that their very smart and very highly paid developers wouldn't embarrass them based on nothing more than expectations, but they failed. They could have done more rigorous "live" testing before rolling this out to the public.

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

#818

Post by anothernewdude »

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…

> who offer insights based on how stuff works at a small scale, or better yet, pronouncements rooted in “first principles.”

And looking through the comments, this is just wrong.

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

#819

Post by yusyusyus »

I wrote an analysis on doing this kind of unicast streaming in cable networks a decade ago. For edge networks with reasonable 100gig distribution as their standard, these would see some of the minor buffering issues.

There is a reason that cable doesn’t stream unicast and uses multicast and QAM on a wire. We’ve just about hit the point where this kind of scale unicast streaming is feasible for a live event without introducing a lot of latency. Some edge networks (especially without local cache nodes) just simply would not have enough capacity, whether in the core or peering edge, to do the trick.

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

#820

Post by rustcleaner »

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…

All my stuff is combined in one interfare with Kodi. It is nice to have a TV which fully 100% respects me!
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