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On my Samsung TV (and via casting) I have access to 6 streaming platforms: Netflix, HBO Nordic, Viaplay, TV 2 play, C-more (related to the French Canal+) and a

by Erwin 8y ago

On my Samsung TV (and via casting) I have access to 6 streaming platforms: Netflix, HBO Nordic, Viaplay, TV 2 play, C-more (related to the French Canal+) and a local service for streaming managed by the national public library system (limited to loaning 3 movies per week) Of those Netflix is famous for its complex distributed architecture and employs 100s (if not 1000s?) of the very best engineers in the world (at $400k+/year compensation). I haven't heard about ground-breaking architecture from the others and don't imagine they spend 10s of millions of $ every year on the software like Netflix does. I'm not really seeing any difference in uptime or performance. In fact, if I want to stream a new movie, I will use Viaplay (I can rent new stuff there for $5), or the library streaming service (which has more interesting arthouse stuff). So why is Netflix in any way a software success story, if competitors can do the same thing for 1/100th the cost?

cuddlecake 8y ago
Not sure if the competitors have the same kind of scaling demands as Netflix does. If we were to go `extreme` in regards to your comparison: why does Facebook need such a large infrastructure for messaging, if my monolithic Homebrew family-only messaging application has just as much uptime and performance, for 20$ a month?
jakeinspace 8y ago
Because scale is not trivial. Netflix offers more titles (I'm assuming) than all of those services combined, and more importantly, over many many times more simultaneous streams. Sure, there may be engineering effort being wasted in the ML-fueled-recommendation department, but their back-end is expensive for a reason.
- user5994461 8y ago
  If anything, the amount of titles on Netflix is risible. There are only so few TV shows with only a few episodes a year. The little variety of content is a great advantage, it takes little storage and it's very cache friendly. It's countless orders of magnitude below user generated content like youtube/dailymotion/vimeo. It shouldn't be much different than video archives from TV or large studios.
nisa 8y ago
Netflix has 15% of Internet traffic worldwide.
- user5994461 8y ago
  Netflix has 30% of US traffic and much much less in the rest of the world.
jeremyjh 8y ago
I often go for weeks where HBO Now won't work all or at least much of the time. I try to watch a movie, it says an error occurred and gives me a trace ID. I contact support, they ask me to reboot my router. They have no idea what trace IDs are for. Could I reboot it again? HBO Now still doesn't support 4k. Netflix virtually never fails for me, is always streaming in high-quality 4k. Whatever they are doing, it is working and they are operating a scale much larger than those other players you mention.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I’ve only ever found HBO Go apps to be more reliable than Netflix. Netflix frequently takes forever for content to load, especially heavy menus, and Netflix does a poor job of remembering my place in an episode if I turn it off and switch devices. Additionally, Netflix aggressively blocks VPN traffic, even if I am a US-based customer using US-only VPN locations. Never had any of these problems with HBO apps.
mymythisisthis 8y ago
Glad that you gave a shutout to the library!
barbecue_sauce 8y ago
I would say its impressive that Netflix (an international organization present in 190 countries) has been able to leverage its operational and development expertise to offer an experience on par with those programs that only need limited local (small nation rather than international) distribution.
user5994461 8y ago
Other pay tens of millions to CDN like Akamai. Not to mention that many streaming services are affiliated to ISP, whose specialty is to distribute content. Netflix has to be a bit more efficient on the tech, because they have lower revenues and they don't own the pipes. Besides that, the war is about content rights, not distribution. Netflix can maintain an image to be the cool kid in town, unlike older companies that don't care about that.

by Erwin 8y ago

cuddlecake 8y ago

Not sure if the competitors have the same kind of scaling demands as Netflix does. If we were to go `extreme` in regards to your comparison: why does Facebook need such a large infrastructure for messaging, if my monolithic Homebrew family-only messaging application has just as much uptime and performance, for 20$ a month?

jakeinspace 8y ago

Because scale is not trivial. Netflix offers more titles (I'm assuming) than all of those services combined, and more importantly, over many many times more simultaneous streams. Sure, there may be engineering effort being wasted in the ML-fueled-recommendation department, but their back-end is expensive for a reason.

user5994461 8y ago
If anything, the amount of titles on Netflix is risible. There are only so few TV shows with only a few episodes a year. The little variety of content is a great advantage, it takes little storage and it's very cache friendly. It's countless orders of magnitude below user generated content like youtube/dailymotion/vimeo. It shouldn't be much different than video archives from TV or large studios.

nisa 8y ago

Netflix has 15% of Internet traffic worldwide.

user5994461 8y ago
Netflix has 30% of US traffic and much much less in the rest of the world.

jeremyjh 8y ago

I often go for weeks where HBO Now won't work all or at least much of the time. I try to watch a movie, it says an error occurred and gives me a trace ID. I contact support, they ask me to reboot my router. They have no idea what trace IDs are for. Could I reboot it again? HBO Now still doesn't support 4k. Netflix virtually never fails for me, is always streaming in high-quality 4k. Whatever they are doing, it is working and they are operating a scale much larger than those other players you mention.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I’ve only ever found HBO Go apps to be more reliable than Netflix. Netflix frequently takes forever for content to load, especially heavy menus, and Netflix does a poor job of remembering my place in an episode if I turn it off and switch devices. Additionally, Netflix aggressively blocks VPN traffic, even if I am a US-based customer using US-only VPN locations. Never had any of these problems with HBO apps.

mymythisisthis 8y ago

Glad that you gave a shutout to the library!

barbecue_sauce 8y ago

I would say its impressive that Netflix (an international organization present in 190 countries) has been able to leverage its operational and development expertise to offer an experience on par with those programs that only need limited local (small nation rather than international) distribution.

user5994461 8y ago

Other pay tens of millions to CDN like Akamai. Not to mention that many streaming services are affiliated to ISP, whose specialty is to distribute content. Netflix has to be a bit more efficient on the tech, because they have lower revenues and they don't own the pipes. Besides that, the war is about content rights, not distribution. Netflix can maintain an image to be the cool kid in town, unlike older companies that don't care about that.