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

    (www.sportingnews.com)
    492 points storf45 | 11 comments | 16 Nov 24 03:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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    shermantanktop ◴[16 Nov 24 23:29 UTC] No.42160502[source]▶
    Every time a big company screws up, there are two highly informed sets of people who are guaranteed to be lurking, but rarely post, in a thread like this:

    1) those directly involved with the incident, or employees of the same company. They have too much to lose by circumventing the PR machine.

    2) people at similar companies who operate similar systems with similar scale and risks. Those people know how hard this is and aren’t likely to publicly flog someone doing their same job based on uninformed speculation. They know their own systems are Byzantine and don’t look like what random onlookers think it would look like.

    So that leaves the rest, who offer insights based on how stuff works at a small scale, or better yet, pronouncements rooted in “first principles.”

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    dpkirchner ◴[16 Nov 24 23:41 UTC] No.42160576[source]▶
    Right? A common complaint by outsiders is that Netflix uses microservices. I'd love to hear exactly how a monolith application is guaranteed to perform better, with details. What is the magic difference that would have ensured the live stream would have been successful?
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    ilrwbwrkhv ◴[17 Nov 24 02:13 UTC] No.42161427[source]▶
    I am one of the ones who complain about their microservices architecture quite a lot.

    This comes from both first-hand experience of talking to several of their directors when consulted upon on how to make certain systems of theirs better.

    It's not just a matter of guarantees, it's a matter of complexity.

    Like right now Google search is dying and there's nothing that they can do to fix it because they have given up control.

    The same thing happened with Netflix where they wanted to push too hard to be a tech company and have their tech blogs filled with interesting things.

    On the back end they went too deep on the microservices complexity. And on the front end for a long time they suffered with their whole RxJS problem.

    So it's not an objective matter of what's better. It's more cultural problem at Netflix. Plus the fact that they want to be associated with "Faang" and yet their product is not really technology based.

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    1. kjellsbells ◴[17 Nov 24 02:52 UTC] No.42161613[source]▶
    > they want to be associated with "Faang" and yet their product is not really technology based.

    You lost me. Netflix built a massive CDN, a recommendation engine, did dynamic transcoding of video, and a bunch of other things, at scale, quite some years before everyone else. They may have enshittified in the last five years, but I dont see any reason why they dont have a genuinely legitimate claim to being a founder member of the FAANG club.

    I have a much harder time believing that companies with AI in their name or domain are doing any kind of AI, by contrast.

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    2. ilrwbwrkhv ◴[17 Nov 24 06:53 UTC] No.42162442[source]▶
    Pornhub has better, more reliable technology than Netflix, yet you don't see their tech blog very often do you?
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    3. always_imposter ◴[17 Nov 24 10:09 UTC] No.42163202[source]▶
    fair.

    I have always wondered how do they deliver their content and what goes on behind the scenes and nobody on tech twitter or even youtubers talk about pornhub's infra for some reason. A lot of the innovation in tech has roots in people wanting to see high quality tiddies on the internet.

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    4. bdangubic ◴[17 Nov 24 11:19 UTC] No.42163492[source]▶
    PH has to stream for 20 seconds on average while boxing match is a lot longer :-)
    replies(1): >>42166938 #
    5. badpun ◴[17 Nov 24 11:37 UTC] No.42163584[source]▶
    Same thing was done a little later by HBO, Disney and a plethora of others, which points to the task not really being uber-difficult.
    replies(2): >>42164110 #>>42164213 #
    6. moomin ◴[17 Nov 24 13:30 UTC] No.42164110[source]▶
    Speaking as a consumer, Netflix’s solution is objectively better than it’s competitors. It handles network blips better, it’s more responsive to use, it has far fewer random bugs you need to work around.

    You can argue whether or not that edge translates into more revenue, but the edge is objectively there.

    replies(2): >>42166932 #>>42172878 #
    7. Agingcoder ◴[17 Nov 24 14:00 UTC] No.42164213[source]▶
    Based on my experience as a client, they’re not as reliable, Disney in particular. I thought it was a solved problem but it’s not apparently.
    8. E39M5S62 ◴[17 Nov 24 14:53 UTC] No.42164474{3}[source]▶
    I worked on PH infra for a few years -

    * The frontend itself runs on bare metal

    * A lot of the backend was built out as microservices, running on top of Mesos and then later K8s

    * CDN was in-house. The long tail is surprisingly long, but the front page videos were cached globally

    The unifying theme behind PH is that they host everything on their own equipment, no AWS/GCP involved.

    9. johnnyanmac ◴[17 Nov 24 20:28 UTC] No.42166932{3}[source]▶
    Hard to speak "objectively" as a consumer who has their own regional biases and knows none of the sausage underneath.

    Maybe you're in a rural area and Netflix scaled gracefully. Maybe you're deep in SF and Netflix simply outspent to give minimal disruption to a population hub. These could both be true but don't speak to what performs better overall.

    10. johnnyanmac ◴[17 Nov 24 20:29 UTC] No.42166938{3}[source]▶
    Sounds like a consumer issue ;)
    11. IIsi50MHz ◴[18 Nov 24 14:59 UTC] No.42172878{3}[source]▶
    Agree. Hulu, HBO/Max, and Disney Plus each do most of these:

    - frequently decide that episodes I've watched are either completely unwatched (with random fully watched eps of the show mixed in).

    - seemingly every time I leave at the start of the end-credits, I surely must have intended to come back and watch them.

    - rebuild the entire interface (progressively, slowly) when I've left the tab unfocussed for too long. Instead of letting continue where I was, they show it for less than a second, the rebuild the world.

    - keep resetting the closed-caption setting to "none", regardless of choosing "always" or "on instant replay"; worse, they sometimes still have the correct setting in the interface, but have disabled captions anyway.

    Netflix has only once since they started streaming forgotten playback position or episode completion. They politely suggest when to reload the page (via a tiny footer banner), but even that might not appear for months. They usually know where end-credits really start, and count that as completion. They don't seem to mess with captions.