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

    (www.sportingnews.com)
    492 points storf45 | 11 comments | 16 Nov 24 03:42 UTC | HN request time: 1.83s | source | bottom
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    freditup ◴[16 Nov 24 03:57 UTC] No.42154036[source]▶
    I wonder if there will be any long term reputational repercussions for Netflix because of this. Amongst SWEs, Netflix is known for hiring the best people and their streaming service normally seems very solid. Other streaming services have definitely caught up a bit and are much more reliable then in the early days, but my impression still has always been that Netflix is a step above the rest technically.

    This sure doesn't help with that impression, and it hasn't just been a momentary glitch but hours of instability. And the Netflix status page saying "Netflix is up! We are not currently experiencing an interruption to our streaming service." doesn't help either...

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    ocdtrekkie ◴[16 Nov 24 04:03 UTC] No.42154059[source]▶
    So the issue is that Netflix gets its performance from colocating caches of movies in ISP datacenters, and a live broadcast doesn't work with that. It's not just about the sheer numbers of viewers, it's that a live model totally undermines their entire infrastructure advantage.

    See: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

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    1. stingraycharles ◴[16 Nov 24 04:08 UTC] No.42154076[source]▶
    Correct, this is not Netflix’ regular cup of tea, and it’s a very different problem to solve. They can probably use their edge caches, but it’s challenging.
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    2. nicce ◴[16 Nov 24 04:17 UTC] No.42154146[source]▶
    How YouTube does this? Netflix is like drop in the ocean when compared to.
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    3. Bilal_io ◴[16 Nov 24 04:24 UTC] No.42154194[source]▶
    Not sure how Netflix does it. But this is not very time sensitive, and I would have delayed the stream by 15 to 30 seconds to cache it and then deliver to everyone.
    4. unsnap_biceps ◴[16 Nov 24 04:25 UTC] No.42154203[source]▶
    My wild assed guess is the differences in the edge nodes.

    Netflix's edge nodes are optimized for streaming already encoded videos to end users. They have to transcode some number of formats from the source and send them all to the edge nodes to flow out. It's harder to manage a ton of different streams flowing out to the edge nodes cleanly.

    I would guess YouTube, being built on google's infrastructure , has powerful enough edge nodes that they stream one video stream to each edge location and the edges transcode for the clients. Only one stream from source to edge to worry about and is much simpler to support and reason about.

    But that's just my wild assed guess.

    replies(1): >>42154516 #
    5. spike021 ◴[16 Nov 24 04:46 UTC] No.42154344[source]▶
    In my experience even YouTubeTV has problems sometimes. I'll have the 1080p (and enhanced mode also I think) quality set and still deal with a lot of compression artifacts.
    6. vitus ◴[16 Nov 24 05:19 UTC] No.42154516{3}[source]▶
    > I would guess YouTube, being built on google's infrastructure , has powerful enough edge nodes that they stream one video stream to each edge location and the edges transcode for the clients.

    Ha, no, our edge nodes don't have anywhere near enough spare CPU to do transcoding on the fly.

    We have our own issues with livestreaming, but our system's developed differently over the past 15 years compared to Netflix's. While they've historically focused on intelligent pre-placement of data (which of course doesn't work for livestreaming), such an approach was never feasible for YT with the sheer size of our catalog (thanks to user-generated content).

    Netflix is still new to the space, and there isn't a good substitute for real-world experience for understanding how your systems behave under wildly different traffic patterns. Give them some time.

    replies(1): >>42154640 #
    7. kortilla ◴[16 Nov 24 05:52 UTC] No.42154640{4}[source]▶
    It also helps that youtube serves shit tier quality videos more gracefully. Everyone is used to the step down to pixel-world on youtube to the point where they don’t complain much.
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    8. Ekaros ◴[16 Nov 24 06:04 UTC] No.42154713{5}[source]▶
    And decent part of these users are on free tier, so they are not paying for it. That alone gives you some level of forgiveness. At least I am not paying anything for this experience.
    9. brokenmachine ◴[18 Nov 24 04:06 UTC] No.42169632{5}[source]▶
    I stream hours of 4k60 from youtube every day for free.

    I get maybe 1m total of buffering per week, if that.

    Seems uncharitable to complain about that.

    replies(1): >>42172216 #
    10. bobdvb ◴[18 Nov 24 13:43 UTC] No.42172216{6}[source]▶
    Live streams have different buffering logic to video on demand. Customers watching sports will get very upset if there is a long buffer, but for a VOD playback you don't care how big the buffer is. Segment sizes are short for live and long for VOD because you need to adapt faster and keep buffers small for Live, but longer download segments are better for buffering.
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    11. brokenmachine ◴[18 Nov 24 21:56 UTC] No.42177550{7}[source]▶
    Sorry, yeah, for some stupid reason I was not thinking about live streams.