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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

#881

Post by badpun »

kjellsbells wrote: post #791
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am one of the ones who complain about their microservices architecture quite a lot. This comes from both first-hand experience of talking to several of their directors when consulted upon on how to make certain systems of theirs better. It's not just a matter of guarantees, it's a matter of complexity. Like right now Google search is dying and there's nothing that they can do to fix it because they have given up co…

> they want to be associated with "Faang" and yet their product is not really technology based. You lost me. Netflix built a massive CDN, a recommendation engine, did dynamic transcoding of video, and a bunch of other things, at scale, quite some years before everyone else. They may have enshittified in the last five years, but I dont see any reason why they dont have a genuinely legitimate claim to being a founder m…

Same thing was done a little later by HBO, Disney and a plethora of others, which points to the task not really being uber-difficult.

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

#882

Post by omnee »

michaelt wrote: post #740
devit wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is live a lot harder? Aside from latency (which isn't much of a problem unless you are competing with TV or some other distribution system), it seems easier than on-demand, since you send the same data to everyone and don't need to handle having a potentially huge library in all datacenters (you have to distribute the data, but that's just like having an extra few users per server). My guess is that the problem w…

Latency is somewhat important for huge sporting events; you don't want every tense moment spoiled by the cheers of your neighbours whose feed is 20 seconds ahead. With on-demand you can push the episodes out through your entire CDN at your leisure. It doesn't matter if some bottleneck means it takes 2 hours to distribute a 1 hour show worldwide, if you're distributing it the day before. And if you want to test, or fi…

Latency between the live TV signal for my neighbours and the BBC iPlayer app I was using to watch the Euro 2024 final literally ruined the main moments for me. It still remains an unsolved issue long into the advent of live streaming.

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

#883

Post by survirtual »

Edman274 wrote: post #750
survirtual wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The protocol for a torrent is that random parts of a file get seeded to random people requesting a file, and that the clients which act as seeds are able to store arbitrary amounts of data to then forward to other clients in the swarm. Do the properties about scaling still hold when it's a bunch of people all requesting real time data which has to be in-order? Do the distributed Rokus, Apple TVs, Fire TVs and other s…

Use your imagination for just a moment.

The torrent is an example of the system I am describing, not the same system. Torrents cannot work for live streams because the entire content is not hashable yet, so already you have to rethink how it's done. I am talking about adding a p2p layer on top of the existing streaming protocol.

The current streaming model would prioritize broadcasting to high-bandwidth users first. There should be millions of those in a world-scale stream.

Even a fraction of these millions would be enough to reduce Netflix's streaming costs by an order of magnitude. But maybe Netflix isn't interested in saving billions?

With more viewers, the availability of content increases, which reduces load on the centralized servers. This is the property of the system I am talking about, so think backwards from that.

With a livestream, you want the youngest block to take priority. You would use the DHT to manage clients and to manage stale blocks for users catching up.

The youngest block would be broadcast on the p2p network and anyone who is "live" would be prioritizing access to that block.

Torrent clients as they are now handle this case, in reverse; they can prioritize blocks closer the current timestamp to created an uninterrupted stream.

The system I am talking about would likely function at any scale, which is an improvement from Netflix's system, which we know will fail -- because it did.

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

#884

Post by kasey_junk »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #508
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…

> the idea that Netflix could just take some off the shelf widget and stuff it in their network to solve a problem Right. They have to hire one of the companies that does this. Each of YouTube, Twitch (Amazon), Facebook and TikTok have, I believe, handled 10+ million streams. The last two don't compete with Netflix.

We now know it was more than 60m streams. I think it’s either a record or approaching one for a live stream.

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

#885

Post by ta1243 »

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.

The point is that if the problem was different depending on the user, it will be in a distribution layer, not in the encoding or production layer

That eliminates a whole raft of problems.

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

#886

Post by ta1243 »

vitus wrote: post #391
nonameiguess wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way 300 million people watched this, especially if that number is representing every Netflix subscriber. The largest claimed live broadcast across all platforms is last year's Super Bowl with 202 million unique viewers for at least part of it, but that includes CBS, Nickelodeon, and Univision, not just streaming audiences. Its average viewers for the whole game was 123 million, which is second all-time to…

FIFA claimed the 2022 World Cup final reached 1.5 billion people worldwide, but again that seems like it was mostly via broadcast television and cable. As far as single stream, Disney's Hotstar claimed 59 million for last year's Cricket World Cup, and as far as the YT platform, the Chandrayaan-3 lunar landing hit 8 million. 100 million is a lot of streams, let alone 300. But also note that not every stream reaches a…

480p30 could be as high as 280mbit or as low as 280kbit. Same with other resolutions.

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

#887

Post by ta1243 »

markus92 wrote: post #383
margaretdouglas wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there ever been a 300m concurrent live stream? I thought Disney+ had the record at something like 60m.

World Cup final, if you add up all streams worldwide?

Not through a single system, the advantage of diversity rather than winner-takes-all.

The world cup final itself (and other major events) is distributed from the host broadcaster to either on site at the IBC or at major exchange points.

When I've done major events of that magnitude there's usually a backup scanner and even a tertiary backup. Obviously feeds get sent via all manner - the international feed for example may be handed off at an exchange point, but the reserve is likely available on satelite for people to downlink on. If the scanner goes (fire etc), then at least some camera/sound feeds can be switched direct to these points, on some occasions there's a full backup scanner too.

Short of events that take out the venue itself, I can't think of a plausible scenario which would cause the generation or distribution of the broadcast to break on a global basis.

I don't work for OBS/HBS/etc but I can't imagine they are any worse than other broadcast professionals.

The IT part of this stuff is pretty trivial nowadays, even the complex parts like the 2110 networks in the scanner tend to be commoditised and treated as you'd treat any other single system.

The most technically challenging part is unicast streaming to millions of people at low latency (DASH etc). I wouldn't expect an enormous architectural difference between a system that can broadcast to 10 million or 100 million though.

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

#889

Post by ta1243 »

yusyusyus wrote: post #819

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 in…

Saw an Arista presentation about the increase in SFP capacity, it's Moore law style stuff. Arm based kit has a shockingly efficient amount of streams-per-watt too.

I can't see traditional DVB/ATSC surviging much beyond 2040 even accounting for the long tail.

You're right that large scale parallel live streams has only become feasible in the last few years. The BBC has some insights in how the BBC had to change their approach to scale to getting 10 million in 2021, having had technical issues in the 3 million range in 2018

https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk...

Personally I don't think the latency is solved yet -- TV is slow enough (about 10 seconds from camera to TV), but IP streaming tends to add another 20-40 seconds on top of that.

That's no good when you're watching the penalties. Not only will your neighbours be cheering before you as they watch on normal TV, but even if you're both on the same IPTV you may well 5 seconds of difference.

The total end-to-end time is important too, with 30 seconds the news push notifications, tweets, etc on your phone will come in before you see the result.

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

#890

Post by sfn42 »

mbesto wrote: post #443
Loughla wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>First off the deal that they struck was probably one they couldn't ignore If you can't provide the service you shouldn't sell it?

There are endless amounts of stories and situations in which selling something before it really exists has helped businesses. It's totally plausible that a team working on video streaming at the scale of Netflix could figure out live streaming. Pre-optimization is definitely a thing and it can massively hurt (i.e. startups go under) businesses. Let's stop pretending any businesses would say 'no' to extra revenue even…

In my language we have a saying that roughly translates to "Don't sell the hide until you've shot the bear".

And sure, there have probably been lots of examples where a business made promises they weren't confident about and succeeded. But there are surely also lots of examples where they didn't succeed.

So what's the moral of the story? I don't know, maybe if you take a gamble you should be prepared to lose that gamble. Sounds to me like Netflix fucked up. They sold something they couldn't provide. What are the consequences of that? I don't know, not do I particularly care. Not my problem.

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