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

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.”

For an event like this, there already exists an architecture that can handle boundless scale: torrents.

If you code it to utilize high-bandwidth users upload, the service becomes more available as more users are watching -- not less available.

It becomes less expensive with scale, more available, more stable.

The be more specific, if you encode the video in blocks with each new block hash being broadcast across the network, just managing the overhead of the block order, it should be pretty easy to stream video with boundless scale using a DHT.

Could even give high-bandwidth users a credit based upon how much bandwidth they share.

With a network like what Netflix already has, the seed-boxes would guarantee stability. There would be very little delay for realtime streams, I'd imagine 5 seconds top. This sort of architecture would handle planet-scale streams for breakfast on top of the already existing mechanism.

But then again, I don't get paid $500k+ at a large corp to serve planet scale content, so what do I know.

Yes, and then some idiot with an axe to grind against Logan Paul starts DDoSing people in the Netflix swarm, kicking them out of the livestream. This is always a problem because torrents, by design, are privacy-hostile. That's how the MAFIAA[1] figured out you were torrenting movies in 2004 and how they sent your ISP a takedown notice.

Hell, in the US, this setup might actually be illegal because of the VPPA[0]. The only reason why it's not illegal for the MAFIAA to catch you torrenting is because of a fun legal principle where criminals are not allowed to avail themselves of the law to protect their crimes. (i.e. you can't sue over a drug deal gone wrong)

[0] Video Privacy Protection Act, a privacy law passed which makes it illegal to ask video providers for a list of who watched what, specifically because a reporter went on a fishing expedition with video data.

[1] Music and Film Industry Association of America, a hypothetical merger of the MPAA and RIAA from a 2000s era satire article