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

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.

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.

Latency is somewhat important for huge sporting events; you don't want every tense moment spoiled by the cheers of your neighbours whose feed is 20 seconds ahead.

With on-demand you can push the episodes out through your entire CDN at your leisure. It doesn't matter if some bottleneck means it takes 2 hours to distribute a 1 hour show worldwide, if you're distributing it the day before. And if you want to test, or find something that needs fixing? You've got plenty of time.

And on-demand viewers can trickle in gradually - so if clients have to contact your DRM servers for a new key every 15 minutes, they won't all be doing it at the same moment.

And if you did have a brief hiccup with your DRM servers - could you rely on the code quality of abandonware Smart TV clients to save you?