5 ms·

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 (

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.

marchie_uk 2y ago
> The NFL seems to be quite particular (in a good way) about the quality of the delivery of their content Alas, my experience with the NFL in the UK does not reflect that. DAZN have the rights to stream NFL games here, and there are aspects of their service that are very poor. My major, long-standing issue has been the editing of their full game “ad-free” replays - it is common for chunks of play to be cut out, including touchdowns and field goals. Repeated complaints to DAZN haven’t resulted in any improvements. I can’t help but think that if the NFL was serious about the quality of their offering, they’d be knocking heads together at DAZN to fix this.
- grogenaut 2y ago
  I don't think they think this is a problem actually. Content edited replays are actually very popular with sports fans who are time shifting. Time shifting is also an afterthought for the NFL / MLB / NHL from what I can tell. I live in Seattle but grew up in the midwest so time shift a ton of sports and it's always been horrific. I'm more comparing Thursday Night Football and the quality of the encoding than anything. Delivery glitches are a seperate issue that I think they care about less. NFL: 90+ minutes after the match on NFL Gameday, and it auto plays the most recent video for that team, which is always the post game interview. So you load it up, go to your team and it auto plays the "we won" or "it was a tough loss" like why the f*ck am I paying for a dvr solution when you do that. NFL Sunday Ticket: you can watch the games sometime monday after the fact but not the sunday night games. Good thing I paid well below half price for it with a disciount. NHL: constantly shifting networks each year with worse solutions and not letting you get to half the previous games after a week. Totally useless for deferred unless you only want to watch the game a day or more after. Fubo, you have to 'record' the game and sometimes it's on a slightly different network and doesn't record. And their blackout system is the worst of all, who cares about your mediocre local team sorry you can't watch Chefs/Bills because they overlapped by some amount. MLB: always broken at the top of the year, constantly changing the interface. You often get stuck watching the commercial break which is not actually commercials and is just the same "ohtani / judge highlight video from 2 years ago" and a "stat" about the sluggers that is almost an entire season out of date. The app resets when switching from the live CDN to the on demand one once the game ends which often resets the game and jumps you 6 innings forward, or makes the game unavialable for 30 minutes. And EFF you if you want to watch playoffs on any of them.
mountainriver 2y ago
Netflix’s snobbery of engineering is so exhausting. Then seeing them be unable to fix this problem after several previous streaming failures is a bit rich. To me it speaks to how most of the top tech companies of the 2010s have degraded as of late. I see it all the time with Google hiring some of the lower performing engineers on my teams because they crushed Leetcode.
devit 2y ago
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.
- michaelt 2y ago
  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?
  - MBCook 2y ago
    That has been a big problem for football, especially things like the Super Bowl. People using over the air antennas get it “live“. Getting it from cable or a streaming service meant anywhere between a few seconds and over a minute of delay. It was absolutely common to have a friend text you about something that just happened when you haven’t even seen it yet. You can’t even say that $some_service is fast, some of them vary over 60 seconds just between their own users. https://www.phenixrts.com/resource/super-bowl-2024 https://www.phenixrts.com/resource/super-bowl-2024
  - omnee 2y ago
    Latency between the live TV signal for my neighbours and the BBC iPlayer app I was using to watch the Euro 2024 final literally ruined the main moments for me. It still remains an unsolved issue long into the advent of live streaming.

marchie_uk 2y ago

> The NFL seems to be quite particular (in a good way) about the quality of the delivery of their content Alas, my experience with the NFL in the UK does not reflect that. DAZN have the rights to stream NFL games here, and there are aspects of their service that are very poor. My major, long-standing issue has been the editing of their full game “ad-free” replays - it is common for chunks of play to be cut out, including touchdowns and field goals. Repeated complaints to DAZN haven’t resulted in any improvements. I can’t help but think that if the NFL was serious about the quality of their offering, they’d be knocking heads together at DAZN to fix this.

grogenaut 2y ago
I don't think they think this is a problem actually. Content edited replays are actually very popular with sports fans who are time shifting. Time shifting is also an afterthought for the NFL / MLB / NHL from what I can tell. I live in Seattle but grew up in the midwest so time shift a ton of sports and it's always been horrific. I'm more comparing Thursday Night Football and the quality of the encoding than anything. Delivery glitches are a seperate issue that I think they care about less. NFL: 90+ minutes after the match on NFL Gameday, and it auto plays the most recent video for that team, which is always the post game interview. So you load it up, go to your team and it auto plays the "we won" or "it was a tough loss" like why the f*ck am I paying for a dvr solution when you do that. NFL Sunday Ticket: you can watch the games sometime monday after the fact but not the sunday night games. Good thing I paid well below half price for it with a disciount. NHL: constantly shifting networks each year with worse solutions and not letting you get to half the previous games after a week. Totally useless for deferred unless you only want to watch the game a day or more after. Fubo, you have to 'record' the game and sometimes it's on a slightly different network and doesn't record. And their blackout system is the worst of all, who cares about your mediocre local team sorry you can't watch Chefs/Bills because they overlapped by some amount. MLB: always broken at the top of the year, constantly changing the interface. You often get stuck watching the commercial break which is not actually commercials and is just the same "ohtani / judge highlight video from 2 years ago" and a "stat" about the sluggers that is almost an entire season out of date. The app resets when switching from the live CDN to the on demand one once the game ends which often resets the game and jumps you 6 innings forward, or makes the game unavialable for 30 minutes. And EFF you if you want to watch playoffs on any of them.

mountainriver 2y ago

Netflix’s snobbery of engineering is so exhausting. Then seeing them be unable to fix this problem after several previous streaming failures is a bit rich. To me it speaks to how most of the top tech companies of the 2010s have degraded as of late. I see it all the time with Google hiring some of the lower performing engineers on my teams because they crushed Leetcode.

devit 2y ago

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.

michaelt 2y ago
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?
- MBCook 2y ago
  That has been a big problem for football, especially things like the Super Bowl. People using over the air antennas get it “live“. Getting it from cable or a streaming service meant anywhere between a few seconds and over a minute of delay. It was absolutely common to have a friend text you about something that just happened when you haven’t even seen it yet. You can’t even say that $some_service is fast, some of them vary over 60 seconds just between their own users. https://www.phenixrts.com/resource/super-bowl-2024 https://www.phenixrts.com/resource/super-bowl-2024
- omnee 2y ago
  Latency between the live TV signal for my neighbours and the BBC iPlayer app I was using to watch the Euro 2024 final literally ruined the main moments for me. It still remains an unsolved issue long into the advent of live streaming.