Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

sportingnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

931–940 of 986 posts

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

#931

Post by johnnyanmac »

moomin wrote: post #894
badpun wrote: post #881

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Speaking as a consumer, Netflix’s solution is objectively better than it’s competitors. It handles network blips better, it’s more responsive to use, it has far fewer random bugs you need to work around. You can argue whether or not that edge translates into more revenue, but the edge is objectively there.

Hard to speak "objectively" as a consumer who has their own regional biases and knows none of the sausage underneath.

Maybe you're in a rural area and Netflix scaled gracefully. Maybe you're deep in SF and Netflix simply outspent to give minimal disruption to a population hub. These could both be true but don't speak to what performs better overall.

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

#932

Post by johnnyanmac »

bdangubic wrote: post #877
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?

PH has to stream for 20 seconds on average while boxing match is a lot longer :-)

Sounds like a consumer issue ;)

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

#933

Post by leptons »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #902
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…

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

I manage ~3000 customized websites based on the same template code. Sometimes we make changes to the template code that could affect the customizations - it is practically impossible to predict what might cause a problem due to the nature of the customizations. We'll take before and after screenshots of every page on every site, so it can get into the 100s of thousands of screenshots. We'll then run a diff on the screenshots to see what changed, reviewing the screenshots with the most significant changes. Then we'll address the problems we find and deploy the fixed release.

When we do these large screenshot operations, the EC2 instances are running for maybe 15 or 20 minutes total. It's not exactly cheap, but losing clients because we broke their site is something we want to avoid. The sites are hosted on a 3rd party service, and we're rate-limited by IP address, so to get this done in a reasonable amount of time we need to spin up 10,000 EC2 instances to distribute the work. We have our own software to manage the EC2 instances. It's honestly pretty simple, but effective.

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

#934

Post by johnnyanmac »

reaperducer wrote: post #743
SoftTalker wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people even have cable TV anymore? I have internet from my "cable" company but I don't have the "cable" connected to anything but the modem. Everything I watch is streamed. The only thing connected to my TV is a Roku.

Do people even have cable TV anymore? Six seconds on the Google shows 58 million households in the United States. So, roughly 145,000,000 people. You make the tech bubble mistake of believing that high speed internet is as ubiquitous as coax.

>Six seconds on the Google

I see 68.7 million people, not households. There's my 6 seconds.

Maybe 10 minutes would give me a better truth.

>You make the tech bubble mistake of believing that high speed internet is as ubiquitous as coax.

Yes, and no. Given that the top US cities contain about 8% of the population, you can cover a surprising amount of large country with a surprisingly small amount of area coverage. So it's not as straightforward as "people in SF are in a bubble".

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

#935

Post by arduanika »

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…

And nonetheless, it freezes up.

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

#936

Post by listenallyall »

phil21 wrote: post #840
fragmede wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If NFL decides to keep Netflix for that, that is. The bandwidth for that fight was rookie numbers, and after that fiasco, why would the NFL not break their contract and choose someone with a proven track record doing bigger live events, like the World Cup?

Because Netflix pays them either way, I would imagine. Breaking a contract on a sure thing to the tune of tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars for a maybe is a large business risk. Reputational damage is going to be far more Netflix than the NFL if they totally club it. That and this fight is going to likely be an order of magnitude more viewers than the Christmas NFL games if the media estimates on viewership wer…

But "reputational damage" doesn't affect profits. Nobody is canceling Netflix because they had issues watching the fight, just like nobody will cancel if the NFL experience sucks on Netflix. They will bitch and moan on Twitter, but it's essentially just talk.

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

#937

Post by otterley »

jiggawatts wrote: post #926
otterley wrote: post #910

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cours…

So you’re saying the investors are happy to see their money set on fire? Surely they expect at a minimum that their capital investment would make them dividends (increased revenue), and also that the money wasn’t simply set on fire with nothing to show for it and no way to repay it. If I’m wrong then Twitter - and similar companies - are little better than Ponzi schemes, with investors relying on the money of the gre…

> So you’re saying the investors are happy to see their money set on fire?

Ah, HN, where you try to explain how things work, and you get ignorant sarcasm in return.

> Surely they expect at a minimum that their capital investment would make them dividends (increased revenue), and also that the money wasn’t simply set on fire with nothing to show for it and no way to repay it.

Yes, of course. But when safe investments (e.g., Treasuries) are paying out close to zero, investors are going to tolerate lower returns than they do when Treasuries are paying out 3% or more.

It's basic arithmetic: you take the guaranteed rate, add a risk premium, and that's what investors expect from riskier investments. This is well-covered in the class I recommended.

Also, not every investor thinks in terms of consistent return. A pensioner may have a need for a guaranteed 3% annual return to keep pace with inflation. A VC, on the other hand, is often content to have zero returns for years followed by a 100x payout through an IPO.

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

#938

Post by geor9e »

patrick451 wrote: post #916
geor9e wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ISP hypothesis doesn't make sense to me. I could not stream the live event from Netflix. But I could watch any other show on netflix or youtube or hulu at the same time.

Some ISPs have on-site Netflix Open Connect racks. The advantage of this is that they get a high-priority quality of service data stream into the rack, which then serves the cached content to the ISP customers. If your ISP doesn't have a big enough Netflix rack and it gets saturated, then you're getting your streams at the whim of congestion on the open internet. A live stream is a few seconds of video downloaded, and it has to make it over the congestion of the internet in a few seconds and then repeat. If a single one of these repeats hits congestion and gets delayed, you see the buffering spinning wheel. Other shows, on the other hand, can show the cached Netflix splash animation for 10 seconds while they request 20 minutes of cache until they get it. So, dropped packets don't matter much. Even if the internet is seeing congestion every couple of minutes, delaying your packets, it won't matter as non-live content is very flexible and patient about when it receives the next 20-minute chunk. I'm not an ISP or Netflix engineer, so don't take these as exact numbers. I'm just explaining how the "bandwidth problems might be localized" hypothesis can make sense from my general understanding.

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

#939

Post by yusyusyus »

ta1243 wrote: post #889
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…

> Saw an Arista presentation about the increase in SFP capacity, it's Moore law style stuff.

SFP itself isnt much the issue. Serdes is, and then secondarily the operating power envelope for the things (especially for the kinds of optics that run hot). Many tradeoffs available.

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

Tend to agree in well-developed infra, but rural and poorly-developed are well served with more traditional broadcast. Just saying “starlink!” 5 times in a dark bathroom won’t fix that part.

> 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.

I dont think it will get better. Probably worse, but with net better service quality. HLS/DASH are designed for doing the bursty networking thing. Among good reasons for this, mobile works much better in bursts than strict linear streams, segment caching is highly effective, etc.

But I think this makes sense: its a server-side buffering thing that has to happen. So assuming transmuxing (no transcoding lol) and wire latency are 0, we’re hitting the 1-5 seconds for the segment, probably waiting for a fill of 10 seconds to produce the manifest, then buffering client-side another 10 or so. Throw in more cache boxes and it’ll tick up more. It is quite high, but aside from bookies, i dont know how much people will actually care vs complain.

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

#940

Post by pas »

mvandermeulen wrote: post #699
mmooss wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My Dad has always been a fan of boxing What did your Dad think about the 'boxing'?

Was this necessary? The comment was on a tech forum about the tech issues, do we really need to reprosecute the argument that it wasn’t real boxing here too? There are plenty of other places for those so painfully inclined to do so

I appreciated the answer by manquer. HN is tech-focused but not tech-only, right?
Post reply on HN