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

(www.sportingnews.com)
492 points storf45 | 3 comments | 16 Nov 24 03:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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sgarland ◴[16 Nov 24 04:08 UTC] No.42154079[source]▶
I wonder how effective it would be to cache live events with a delay. Write to the tail, read from the head.
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thefreeman ◴[16 Nov 24 04:23 UTC] No.42154189[source]▶
that’s totally unacceptable for live sports which people are able to bet on
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1. kortilla ◴[16 Nov 24 05:52 UTC] No.42154645{3}[source]▶
I have bad news for you. This is how it works already for “live” sports
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2. YZF ◴[16 Nov 24 07:41 UTC] No.42155103[source]▶
Yep. Having actually worked on this sort of stuff I can confirm.

Your ISP doesn't have enough bandwidth to the Internet (generally speaking) for all users to get their feed directly from a central location. And that central location doesn't have enough bandwidth to serve all users even if the ISP could. That said, the delay can be pretty small, e.g. the first user to hit the cache goes upstream, the others basically get the stream as it comes in to the cache. This doesn't make things worse, it makes them better.

3. jrpelkonen ◴[16 Nov 24 18:44 UTC] No.42158227[source]▶
Correct. Here are some latency numbers from the last SuperBowl: https://www.phenixrts.com/resource/super-bowl-2024

Even the best latency is dozens of seconds behind live action.