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

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492 points storf45 | 1 comments | 16 Nov 24 03:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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ctvo ◴[16 Nov 24 18:37 UTC] 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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1. freefaler ◴[16 Nov 24 20:11 UTC] No.42158882[source]▶
As a cofounder of a CDN company that pushed a lot of traffic, the problem with live streaming is that you need to propagate peak viewership trough a loooot of different providers. The peering/connectivity deals are usually not structured for peak capacity that is many times over the normal 95th percentile. You can provision more connectivity, but you don't know how many will want to see the event. Also, live events can be trickier than stored files, because you can't offload to the edges beforehand to warm up the caches.

So Netflix had 2 factors outside of their control

- unknown viewership

- unknown peak capacities outside their own networks

Both are solvable, but if you serve "saved" content you optimize for different use case than live streaming.