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

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...

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/

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.

How YouTube does this? Netflix is like drop in the ocean when compared to.

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.

> 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.

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.