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

(www.sportingnews.com)
492 points storf45 | 9 comments | 16 Nov 24 03:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.349s | 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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1. jeromegv ◴[16 Nov 24 04:15 UTC] No.42154122[source]▶
Not the same demographic but their last large attempt at live was through a Love is blind reunion. It was the same thing, millions of people logging in, epic failure, nothing worked.

They never tried to do a live reunion again. I suppose they should have to get the experience. Because they are hitting the same problems with a much bigger stake event.

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2. barkingcat ◴[16 Nov 24 04:18 UTC] No.42154156[source]▶
yup wanted to say that live stream stuttering has happened before on Netflix - I don't think the reputation is deserved.

From a livestreaming standpoint, netflix is 0/x - for many large events such as love is blind, etc.

From a livestreaming standpoint, look to broadcast news, sports / Olympics broadcasters, etc and you'll see technology, equipment, bandwidth, planning, and professionalism at 1000x of netflix.

Heck, for publicly traded quarterly earnings livestream meetings, they book direct satellite time in addition to fiber to make sure they don't rely only on terrestrial networks which can fail. From a business standpoint, failure during a quarterly meeting stream can mean the destruction of a company (by making shareholders mad that they can't see and vote during the meeting making them push for internal change) - so the stakes are much higher than live entertainment streaming.

Netflix is good at many things, livestreaming is not one of those things.

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3. KennyBlanken ◴[16 Nov 24 04:59 UTC] No.42154424[source]▶
Is anyone surprised? I don't see how their infrastructure can handle this when it was designed for non-realtime precaching of prerecorded content.
4. glimshe ◴[16 Nov 24 11:32 UTC] No.42155883[source]▶
Even some of the old guard can do this. The Olympics worked pretty well (despite the awkward UI), and that was Peacock/NBC.

Perhaps Netflix still needs a dozen more microservices to get this right...

5. emeril ◴[16 Nov 24 14:07 UTC] No.42156514[source]▶
All valid points though each of those examples seemingly only has a fraction of the viewers of the netflix events, right?
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6. tylerchilds ◴[16 Nov 24 16:37 UTC] No.42157261[source]▶
this is false, the tom brady roast was live streamed

yes, love is blind failed, but was definitely not the most recent attempt. they did some other golf thing too, iirc

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7. anshumankmr ◴[16 Nov 24 16:39 UTC] No.42157274[source]▶
tom brady is largely a guy popular in the USA whereas Mike Tyson is globally famous. It follows that this fight would attract a larger audience.
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8. tylerchilds ◴[16 Nov 24 17:21 UTC] No.42157541{3}[source]▶
the point i’m making is that the netflix live streaming timeline didn’t go

chris rock -> love is blind -> mike tyson

they have had other, successful executions in between. the comment i was replying to had cherry picked failures and i’m trying to git rebase them onto main.

9. barkingcat ◴[16 Nov 24 18:22 UTC] No.42158035{3}[source]▶
for livestreams, individual events like the Olympics probably has a surge audience of 10x of netflix events.

Netflix events is small potatoes compared to other livestream stalwarts.

Imagine having to stream a cricket match internationally to UK / India / Australia with combined audience that crushes the Superbowl or a football match to all of Europe, or even something like livestreaming F1 racing that has multiple magnitudes of audience than a boxing match and also has 10x the number of cameras (at 8K+ resolution) across a large physical staging arena (the size of the track/course) in realtime, in addition to streaming directly from the cockpit of cars that are racing 200mph++.

Livestream focused outfits do this all day, everyday.

Netflix doesn't even come close to scratching the "beginner" level of these kinds of live events.

It's a matter of competencies. We wouldn't expect Netflix to be able to serve burgers like McDonald's does - Livestreaming is a completely different discipline and it's hubris on Netflix's part to assume just because they're good at sending video across the internet they can competently do livestreaming.