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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

#901

Post by throwaway2037 »

DrillShopper wrote: post #598
xyst wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making excuses for a multibillion dollar company that has been in this game for many years. Maybe the first to market in streaming. This isn’t NFLX’s first rodeo in live streaming. Have seen a handful of events pop up in their apps. There is no excuse. All of the resources and talent at their disposal, and they looked absolutely amateurish. Poor optics. I would be amazed if they are able to secure another exc…

A company that readily admits it burns out SWRs and SREs in exchange for the big bucks. Just what the fuck are these people doing? If I were a major investor in them I'd be pissed.

You probably are a major investor, incidentally, through your pension fund(s) and retirement savings. It is hard to avoid Netflix if you are doing any kind of broad-based index investing.

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

#902

Post by throwaway2037 »

leptons wrote: post #722
lxgr wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very hard to do a representative dry run when the most likely potential points of failure are highly load-dependent. You can try and predict everything that'll happen in production, but if you have nothing to extrapolate from, e.g. because this is your very first large live event, the chances of getting that right are almost zero. And you can't easily import that knowledge either, because your system might have…

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…

    > Even my small team spins up 10,000 EC2 instances on the regular.
Woah, this sounds very cool. Can you share more details?

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

#903

Post by E39M5S62 »

always_imposter wrote: post #868
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #852

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pornhub has better, more reliable technology than Netflix, yet you don't see their tech blog very often do you?

fair. I have always wondered how do they deliver their content and what goes on behind the scenes and nobody on tech twitter or even youtubers talk about pornhub's infra for some reason. A lot of the innovation in tech has roots in people wanting to see high quality tiddies on the internet.

I worked on PH infra for a few years -

* The frontend itself runs on bare metal

* A lot of the backend was built out as microservices, running on top of Mesos and then later K8s

* CDN was in-house. The long tail is surprisingly long, but the front page videos were cached globally

The unifying theme behind PH is that they host everything on their own equipment, no AWS/GCP involved.

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

#904

Post by vel0city »

leptons wrote: post #722
lxgr wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very hard to do a representative dry run when the most likely potential points of failure are highly load-dependent. You can try and predict everything that'll happen in production, but if you have nothing to extrapolate from, e.g. because this is your very first large live event, the chances of getting that right are almost zero. And you can't easily import that knowledge either, because your system might have…

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…

1) You don't know if they did or did not do this kind of testing. I don't see any proof either way here. You're assuming they didn't.

2) You're assuming whatever issue happened would have been caught by testing on generic EC2 instances in AWS. In the end these streams were going to users on tons of different platforms in lots of different network environments, most of which look nothing like an EC2 instance. Maybe there was something weird with their networking stack on TCL Roku TVs that ended up making network connections reset rapidly chewing up a lot of network resources which led to other issues. What's the EC2 instance type API name for a 55" TCL Roku TV from six years ago on a congested 2.4GHz Wireless N link?

I don't know what happened in their errors. I do know I don't have enough information to say what tests they did or did not run.

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

#905

Post by throwaway2037 »

notatoad wrote: post #86
SoftTalker wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that big a deal if you are watching a few minutes behind? I've watched ball games on streaming networks where I can also hear a local radio broadcast, and the stream is always delayed compared to the radio, sometimes by quite a lot. But you'd never know it if you were just watching the stream.

>Is it really that big a deal if you are watching a few minutes behind? i don't bet on sports. but from friends who do: yes, it's a really really big deal.

I have seen this type of comment a few times here. Why does it matter to a bettor if the stream is delayed by 1-5 mins? How would they even know?

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

#906

Post by vel0city »

yearolinuxdsktp wrote: post #803
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?

https://www.cabletv.com/blog/why-people-still-pay-for-cable says it’s inertia, live sports and ease of use. Don’t act so surprised—-streaming is a pain in the ass to figure out. People have been trained to tolerate a 3-second UI lag for every button press (seemingly all cable boxes are godawfully shitty like this—-it must be the server-side UI rendering design?) BUT! You can record your game and the cable TV DVR is d…

I last regularly used a DirecTV DVR. There were a surprising number of times where it wouldn't let me fast forward through ads. Not only that, sometimes it would connect out to the internet to download new targeted forced ads on stuff that was recorded a while ago.

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

#907

Post by uep »

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.

My suspicion is the same as yours, that this may have been caused by local ISPs being overwhelmed, but it could be a million other things too. I had network issues. I live in a heavily populated suburban area. I have family who live 1000+ miles away in a slightly less populated suburban area, they had no issues at all.

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

#908

Post by bena »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #579
bena wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is weird because this was a solved problem. Every major network can broadcast the Super Bowl without issue. And while Netflix claims it streamed to 280 million, that’s if every single subscriber viewed it. Actual numbers put it in the 120 million range. Which is in line with the Super Bowl. Maybe Netflix needs to ask CBS or ABC how to broadcast

Solves differently though, right? Cable broadcasts are not the same as a streaming video over the internet, right?

Is the goal “show the fight” or “use this technology”?

I guarantee the people trying to watch the fight cared more about watching the fight than how the fight was watched.

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

#909

Post by dartos »

PeterStuer wrote: post #875
dartos wrote: post #856

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say that because, for performance reasons, you’d never want to wait on potentially several hops to stream media and because the act of streaming could very well be a good enough domain boundary.

I'm fairly well versed in basic ip networks, but the above sounds like a wordsalad to me.

That’s okay, you probably just haven’t worked with high performance services or micro services before.

Network requests (sometimes called hops) take a significant amount of time. You don’t want your streaming service to take a significant amounts of time.

In microservices land, you generally try making services based on some “domain” (metaphorical, not like a literal domain name) which defines the responsibility of any given service. Defining these domains is more art than science and depends on the business needs and each team.

Video streaming might be one of those domains for Netflix.

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

#910

Post by otterley »

jiggawatts wrote: post #865
aetimmes wrote: post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right before the recent Twitter acquisition, the various bits of info that came to the limelight included the "minor detail" that they had more than doubled their headcount and associated expenses, but had not doubled either their revenue or profits. Every tech company massively inflated their headcount during the leadup to the Twitter acquisition because money was free. I interviewed at Meta in 2021 and asked an E…

Money was not "free". Borrowing costs went to nearly zero. That's not the same thing. You have to repay the money , you just don't have to repay it with interest . I would have assumed people generally know this, but everybody (and I do mean everybody) talks like they don't know this. I would like to assume that "money is free" is just a shorthand, buuuut... again... these arguments! People like that EM talk like it…

Companies weren’t issuing debt to pay for headcount. The reason market interest rates matter is that when interest rates are low, your company stock doesn’t have to have high returns to get investment. When these conditions exist, companies feel safer hiring people to invest in growth instead of saving to provide high shareholder returns.

I highly recommend everyone take a university-level financial instruments course. The math isn’t super hard, and it does a very good job of explaining how rational investors behave.

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