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Netflix always makes for an interesting case, but what always strikes me is how incredibly "trivial" their application really is: It's a simple application at a

by personZ 12y ago

Netflix always makes for an interesting case, but what always strikes me is how incredibly "trivial" their application really is: It's a simple application at a very large scale. This doesn't dismiss their accomplishments, of course, but often it does seem like Netflix spends an enormous engineering effort on fairly low value aspects of the service.

brown9-2 12y ago
this seems like a pretty common fallacy for people to think about an organization from the outside
- personZ 12y ago
  How is it a 'fallacy'? To be clear, this has nothing to do with the actual streaming (which does not happen from EC2) but instead are the basics like viewing history and categories. It absolutely is the simple part of the application, albeit, as mentioned, at a very large scale. Given that someone else mentioned it, does Netflix even bother with the whole recommendation algorithm thing anymore? My personal experience has been that it gives the most superficial of recommendations. And if we're being honest, the Netflix app layer is kind of terrible. I could enumerate the problems, discoverability being king, but it is not the compelling part of the service.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    The recommendations even contradict their own ratings. Netflix often recommends complete crap to me, and even says I'm likely to rate it one star. It even offers me things I've rated as not interesting or one star. Meanwhile, app level features like restricting certain types of content isn't available. I want to be able to delete crap from the Netflix catalog when my kids log in.. I don't care about nudity, language, etc. but more about just how dumb some of the cartoons are.
jrallison 12y ago
You're discounting the "very large scale" portion of your statement. What may seem fairly low value from the outside or consumer perspective is likely of huge value internally to ensure you can always watch Netflix without even thinking about everything that has to happen to deliver as much video as they do to their customer's browsers.
themartorana 12y ago
Well, they make it seem trivial, while dealing with every watch and every pause, every rating updating complex recommendation engine algorithms. They deal with licensing and region awareness and proxying by ISP and running their own CDNs and... And that's the magic. To boot, they do it at enormous scale on a multitude of platforms all while their own destructive code (Chaos Monkey) runs around destroying servers. It's true, some things like "stream me this" are maybe not rocket science, but at Netflix scale, everything becomes a bit more difficult.
- jcampbell1 12y ago
  Netflix is good at providing the service on any device, and having 100% uptime. Their requirements are 100% availability, and an API's that never breaks, but consistency rarely matters. The engineering effort is cool, but it is solving a problem that I don't have. The only thing that matters to netflix is they list the catalog somewhat correctly, and always deliver a stream. I have a different problem, thus I am uninterested in their magic. If I had a similar problem or they signed my paycheck, I'd care.
  - res0nat0r 12y ago
    Not to deride what you are saying, but when I see comments that dismiss Netflix as a site that just simply streams movies consistently; it tells me that the commenters haven't seen and appreciated the difficulty of the problems they are actually solving under the hood as evidenced by their github page. http://netflix.github.io/#repo http://netflix.github.io/#repo
    - personZ 12y ago
      Neither that or the number of open engineering positions tells you the difficulty of the problems they are solving. It might just tell you the difficulty of the problems they are making: If Netflix has a technology side with a history and the executive ability to overcomplicate, they might be making little problems into big problems. My perspective as an outsider is to look at the complexity of their app platform (again, separating the video streams which happen from systems that never seem to be the foundation of these tech blog entries), and it is unarguably not a complex system. Early on I remember the heroics that Netflix went through running on EC2, building numbers of complex tools for varied performance, reliability issues, etc. At the time many much larger sites just quietly worked 24/7, minus the heroics, and minus the effort, often by using purpose-suited dedicated servers. Later, once Amazon rolled out SSDs, Netflix triumphantly announced how much of an improvement it was to their product, again demonstrating that they were creating a problem (huge numbers of horrible I/O machines) that they then solved with gusto, albeit unnecessarily. I'm not trying to be overly down on Netflix, but it is a company that seemed to make tech blog entries a product of the company years ago, and the result is that people have bought into this notion that they're doing some hugely complex task. They aren't.
jeangenie 12y ago
An idea's utility is often orthogonal to its complexity.
morgante 12y ago
Comments like this really annoy me. What exactly is trivial about building a complicated multisource streaming video service with sophisticated recommendations (plus all the other "little" stuff like payments)? Google is "trivial." It's just a box for doing text search on a graph database. Apple is "trivial." They just make pretty skins for commodity hardware & software. Etc. When you consider 99% of everything in your field trivial, maybe you should consider refining your definition of trivial.
- personZ 12y ago
  Comments that contrive absurd strawmen annoy me, even if they provide the author that righteous sense of striking down an imagined position.
chaz 12y ago
Netflix currently has 94 open engineering open reqs, plus another 22 data/analytics open reqs. Perusing through the list should give you a sense of how complicated their products are: http://jobs.netflix.com/jobs.php http://jobs.netflix.com/jobs.php

by personZ 12y ago

brown9-2 12y ago

this seems like a pretty common fallacy for people to think about an organization from the outside

personZ 12y ago
How is it a 'fallacy'? To be clear, this has nothing to do with the actual streaming (which does not happen from EC2) but instead are the basics like viewing history and categories. It absolutely is the simple part of the application, albeit, as mentioned, at a very large scale. Given that someone else mentioned it, does Netflix even bother with the whole recommendation algorithm thing anymore? My personal experience has been that it gives the most superficial of recommendations. And if we're being honest, the Netflix app layer is kind of terrible. I could enumerate the problems, discoverability being king, but it is not the compelling part of the service.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  The recommendations even contradict their own ratings. Netflix often recommends complete crap to me, and even says I'm likely to rate it one star. It even offers me things I've rated as not interesting or one star. Meanwhile, app level features like restricting certain types of content isn't available. I want to be able to delete crap from the Netflix catalog when my kids log in.. I don't care about nudity, language, etc. but more about just how dumb some of the cartoons are.

jrallison 12y ago

You're discounting the "very large scale" portion of your statement. What may seem fairly low value from the outside or consumer perspective is likely of huge value internally to ensure you can always watch Netflix without even thinking about everything that has to happen to deliver as much video as they do to their customer's browsers.

themartorana 12y ago

Well, they make it seem trivial, while dealing with every watch and every pause, every rating updating complex recommendation engine algorithms. They deal with licensing and region awareness and proxying by ISP and running their own CDNs and... And that's the magic. To boot, they do it at enormous scale on a multitude of platforms all while their own destructive code (Chaos Monkey) runs around destroying servers. It's true, some things like "stream me this" are maybe not rocket science, but at Netflix scale, everything becomes a bit more difficult.

jcampbell1 12y ago
Netflix is good at providing the service on any device, and having 100% uptime. Their requirements are 100% availability, and an API's that never breaks, but consistency rarely matters. The engineering effort is cool, but it is solving a problem that I don't have. The only thing that matters to netflix is they list the catalog somewhat correctly, and always deliver a stream. I have a different problem, thus I am uninterested in their magic. If I had a similar problem or they signed my paycheck, I'd care.
- res0nat0r 12y ago
  Not to deride what you are saying, but when I see comments that dismiss Netflix as a site that just simply streams movies consistently; it tells me that the commenters haven't seen and appreciated the difficulty of the problems they are actually solving under the hood as evidenced by their github page. http://netflix.github.io/#repo http://netflix.github.io/#repo
  - personZ 12y ago
    Neither that or the number of open engineering positions tells you the difficulty of the problems they are solving. It might just tell you the difficulty of the problems they are making: If Netflix has a technology side with a history and the executive ability to overcomplicate, they might be making little problems into big problems. My perspective as an outsider is to look at the complexity of their app platform (again, separating the video streams which happen from systems that never seem to be the foundation of these tech blog entries), and it is unarguably not a complex system. Early on I remember the heroics that Netflix went through running on EC2, building numbers of complex tools for varied performance, reliability issues, etc. At the time many much larger sites just quietly worked 24/7, minus the heroics, and minus the effort, often by using purpose-suited dedicated servers. Later, once Amazon rolled out SSDs, Netflix triumphantly announced how much of an improvement it was to their product, again demonstrating that they were creating a problem (huge numbers of horrible I/O machines) that they then solved with gusto, albeit unnecessarily. I'm not trying to be overly down on Netflix, but it is a company that seemed to make tech blog entries a product of the company years ago, and the result is that people have bought into this notion that they're doing some hugely complex task. They aren't.

jeangenie 12y ago

An idea's utility is often orthogonal to its complexity.

morgante 12y ago

Comments like this really annoy me. What exactly is trivial about building a complicated multisource streaming video service with sophisticated recommendations (plus all the other "little" stuff like payments)? Google is "trivial." It's just a box for doing text search on a graph database. Apple is "trivial." They just make pretty skins for commodity hardware & software. Etc. When you consider 99% of everything in your field trivial, maybe you should consider refining your definition of trivial.

personZ 12y ago
Comments that contrive absurd strawmen annoy me, even if they provide the author that righteous sense of striking down an imagined position.

chaz 12y ago

Netflix currently has 94 open engineering open reqs, plus another 22 data/analytics open reqs. Perusing through the list should give you a sense of how complicated their products are: http://jobs.netflix.com/jobs.php http://jobs.netflix.com/jobs.php