How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

All that logging and they cant figure out why people are going to other streaming services

I mean, I haven't been a subscriber for a couple years but are they losing a lot of subscribers?

https://backlinko.com/netflix-users

I see some slowing growth particularly across 2021/2022 but as of this report (April 2024) they were still growing through 2023.

260M subscribers. They aren't exactly hurting.

Despite their awful UX, I'm always impressed with how reliable their service is, technically speaking. Video is always good and responsive even on less-than-stellar connections, you can leave a show paused for hours, and resume it almost instantly. Their fast.com speed test is always much faster than your regular internet access, I guess thanks to their Open Connect Appliances.

It must be great to work for them in infrastructure and backends.

No one I know uses Netflix anymore, and I haven't for a while, but from what I've seen their subscriber numbers are actually doing quite well.

I'm not sure I know anyone that _doesn't_ have it

It's now over 300 million subscribers, as you say they're doing OK.

https://ir.netflix.net/investor-news-and-events/financial-re...

lol wat?

They make 10 billion+ a <b>quarter</b>.

Like seneca, I also don’t know anyone who uses it. That’s interesting. I haven’t used it for around 2 years.

I wonder who uses it when I see their reports, because I don’t know them. I probably have a weird group of friends. I’m sure if I asked, some of my coworkers use it.

My kids would love if we used it. Perhaps it’s big among younger people.

Maybe that's part of it?...my sibling has a toddler and they use it for a lot of children's shows. Conversely, my mother watches it often too (not for kids shows!)

I have an old fire tv and never tried to stop automatic updates on it, it has become so slow and unresponsive that I'm barely able to switch inputs to use something else. Netflix is the only app that still works on that tv.

I can only remember one major outage from them in the past ~10 years (in the 2020s, not the 2012 outage), and if I recall correctly, it was fixed in short order...and they never released a postmortem

Do you use something different? Anecdotally, I find Disney+ to be a major divider. Friends of mine have kids and Disney+ and/or they're still using a decade-old Netflix subscription.

Generally I'd agree, but you must not have seen their attempts at live events :(.

We use Apple TV a small amount (for Silo and Severance most recently), and Disney+ slightly more for the kids. We occasionally use YouTube.

We got a promotion for Disney+ and probably won't renew it. By the time it's over, it seems like there won't be much worth watching left on there. The kids already have a hard time finding anything they're interested in watching.

I also have an old TV and guess what? Netflix stopped working last year. The application is not supported anymore. Beats me why.

Canceled mine a few months ago as I never used it.

Often it’s CA certificates expiring. My old Toshiba had app rot set in like that, where after about 5 years none of the built in apps worked any more and the errors appeared to be TLS related. I suspect that was due to pinned certs to prevent MITM pirating.

They also performed work to ensure it performed well for Starlink customers.

A Global Perspective on the Past, Present, and Future of Video Streaming over Starlink - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3700412 | https://doi.org/10.1145/3700412

Not that this detracts from the wider point, but I'd expect unpause to just work unless you go out of your way to make it not work. Even if you drop the connection at some point, afaik they use ~15 Mb/s as their "premium" bitrate, so e.g. a 30 s buffer takes less than 64 MB. That gives plenty of time to re-establish streaming after an unpause. It's not like the computer forgets what it was doing if you leave it alone.

Counterpoint: Plex and Jellyfin free resources if you leave your video paused too long, and it will take a noticeably amount of time to resume streaming, much more if it needs transcoding.

They're not going out of their way to annoy us, they try to be efficient with the finite resources a home server has. Netflix is going out of their way to make it smooth no matter what you do, even if they have to pool a bit of their own resources for it.

Buffering would be on the client though. Assuming it has a couple dozen MB of memory, it should be able to buffer like 30 seconds. I realize their resume has more to do, but e.g. my jellyfin server can initiate playback or seek within maybe 100-250 ms (it's just barely a noticable pause after a random seek). So a 30 s buffer should be more than sufficient for unpausing without any stutter.