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

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492 points storf45 | 2 comments | 16 Nov 24 03:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.423s | source
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grogenaut ◴[16 Nov 24 23:36 UTC] No.42160548[source]▶
This topic is really just fun for me to read based on where I work and my role.

Live is a lot harder than on demand especially when you can't estimate demand (which I'm sure this was hard to do). People are definitely not understanding that. Then there is that Netflix is well regarded for their engineering not quite to the point of snobbery.

What is actually interesting to me is that they went for an event like this which is very hard to predict as one of their first major forays into live, instead of something that's a lot easier to predict like a baseball game / NFL game.

I have to wonder if part of the NFL allowing Netflix to do the Christmas games was them proving out they could handle live streams at least a month before. The NFL seems to be quite particular (in a good way) about the quality of the delivery of their content so I wouldn't put it past them.

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devit ◴[17 Nov 24 00:29 UTC] No.42160867[source]▶
Why is live a lot harder?

Aside from latency (which isn't much of a problem unless you are competing with TV or some other distribution system), it seems easier than on-demand, since you send the same data to everyone and don't need to handle having a potentially huge library in all datacenters (you have to distribute the data, but that's just like having an extra few users per server).

My guess is that the problem was simply that the number of people viewing Netflix at once in the US was much larger than usual and higher than what they could scale too, or alternatively a software bug was triggered.

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1. MattDaEskimo ◴[17 Nov 24 01:00 UTC] No.42161045[source]▶
I'm not an expert in this, but at least familiar with the trade.

I'd imagine with on-demand services you already have the full content and therefore can use algorithms to compress frames and perform all kinds of neat tricks to.

With live streaming I'd imagine a lot of these algorithms are useless as there isn't enough delay & time to properly use them, so they're required to stream every single pixel and maybe some JIT algorithms

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2. MBCook ◴[17 Nov 24 02:05 UTC] No.42161378[source]▶
People are always impressed that Netflix can stand up to a new episode of Squid Game being released. And it’s not easy, we’ve seen HBO failed to handle Game of Thrones for example.

But in either case, you can put that stuff on your CDN days ahead of time. You can choose to preload it in the cache because you know a bunch of people are gonna want it. You also know that not every single individual is going to start at the exact same time.

For live, every single person wants every single bite at the same time and you can’t preload anything. Brutal.