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492 points storf45 | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.66s | source
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ctvo ◴[] No.42158173[source]
It’s insane the excuses being made here for Netflix’s apparently unique circumstances.

They failed. Full stop. There is no valid technical reason they couldn’t have had a smooth experience. There are numerous people with experience building these systems they could have hired and listened to. It isn’t a novel problem.

Here are the other companies that are peers that livestream just fine, ignoring traditional broadcasters:

- Google (YouTube live), millions of concurrent viewers

- Amazon (Thursday Night Football, Twitch), millions of concurrent viewers

- Apple (MLS)

NBC live streamed the Olympics in the US for tens of millions.

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mfiguiere ◴[] No.42158615[source]
The examples given here are not on the same scale. The numbers known so far:

- 120m viewers [1]

- Entire Netflix CDN Traffic grew 4x when the live stream started [2]

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/jake-paul-...

[2] https://x.com/DougMadory/status/1857634875257294866

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prasadjoglekar ◴[] No.42158702[source]
Disney HotStar managed to stream ~60M livestreams for the Cricket world cup a year ago. The problem has been solved. Livestreaming sports just have a different QoS expectations than on demand.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-did-hotstar-managed-5-9-cr...

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1. achow ◴[] No.42158822[source]
Size of Hotstar team = ~2000. Enggrs will be less than that number.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/disney-hotstar/people/

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2. manquer ◴[] No.42160265[source]
The size of engineering head count is not informative, it really depends on how much is in-house and how much is external for Hotstar that would be i.e parent Disney or before Fox or staffing from IT consulting organizations who will not be on payroll.

For what it is worth, all things being equal there would be lot more non engineering in Hotstar for 2000 employees versus a streaming company of similar size or scale of users. Hotstar operates in challenging and fragmented market, India has 10+ major languages(and corresponding TV, music and movie markets) Technically there is not much difference to what Netflix or Disney has to do for i18n, however operationally each market needs separate sales, distribution and operations.

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P.S. Yes Netflix operates in more markets including India than anybody else, however if you are actually using Netflix for almost any non English content, you will know how weak their library and depth in other markets are, their usual model in most of these markets is to have few big high quality(for that market) content rather than build depth.

P.P.S. Also yes, Indian market is seeing consolidation in the sense that many releases on streaming are multiple lingual and use major stars from more than one language to draw talent ( not new, but growing in popularity as distribution becomes cheaper with streaming), however this is only seen in big banner productions as tastes are quite different in each market and can't scale for all run of the mill content.

3. tim-- ◴[] No.42160300[source]
Disney Streaming has 900 employees, a large majority of which are engineers.

This is the company that supplies technology to Hotstar, Hulu, MLB Live streaming, etc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Streaming

Hotstar is a completely different company.