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:<p>1) those directly involved with the incident, or employees of the same company. They have too much to lose by circumventing the PR machine.<p>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.<p>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.”

The way to deal with this is to constantly do live events, and actually build organizational muscle. Not these massive one off events in an area the tech team has no experience in.

Everyone here talking like this something unique netflix had to deal with. Hotstar live streamed india va Pakistan cricket match with zero issues with all time high live viewership ever in the history of live telecast. Why would viewers paying $20 month want to think about their technical issues, they dropped the ball pure and simple. Tech already exists for this, it’s been done before even by espn, nothing new here.

Netflix is good only on streaming ready made content, not <i>live</i> streaming, but;<p>1. Netflix is a <i>300B</i> company, this isn&#x27;t a resources issue.<p>2. This isn&#x27;t the first time they have done live streaming at this scale either. They already have prior failure experience, you expect the 2nd time to be better, if not perfect.<p>3. There were plenty of time between first massive live streaming to second. Meaning plenty of time to learn and iterate.

People just do not appreciate how many gotchas can pop up doing anything live. Sure, Netflix might have a great CDN that works great for their canned content and I could see how they might have assumed that&#x27;s the hardest part.<p>Live has changed over the years from large satellite dishes beaming to a geosat and back down to the broadcast center($$$$$), to microwave to a more local broadcast center($$$$), to running dedicated fiber long haul back to a broadcast center($$$), to having a kit with multiple cell providers pushing a signal back to a broadcast center($$), to having a direct internet connection to a server accepting a live http stream($).<p>I&#x27;d be curious to know what their live plan was and what their redundant plan was.

Cable TV (or even OTA antenna in the right service area) is simply a superior live product compared to anything streaming.<p>The Masters app is the only thing that comes close imo.<p>Cable TV + DVR + high speed internet for torrenting is still an unmatched entertainment setup. Streaming landscape is a mess.<p>It&#x27;s too bad the cable companies abused their position and lost any market goodwill. Copper connection direct to every home in America is a huge advantage to have fumbled.

It wasn&#x27;t even just buffering issues, the feed would just stop and never start again until I paused it and then clicked &quot;watch live&quot; with the remote.<p>It was really bad. My Dad has always been a fan of boxing so I came over to watch the whole thing with him.<p>He has his giant inflatable screen and a projector that we hooked up in the front lawn to watch it, But everything kept buffering. We figured it was the Wi-Fi so he packed everything up and went inside only to find the same thing happening on ethernet.<p>He was really looking forward to watching it on the projector and Netflix disappointed him.

On a few forum sites I&#x27;m on, people are just giving up. Looking forward to the post-mortem on how they weren&#x27;t ready for this (with just a tiny bit of schadenfreude because they&#x27;ve interviewed and rejected me twice).

I wonder if there will be any long term reputational repercussions for Netflix because of this. Amongst SWEs, Netflix is known for hiring the best people and their streaming service normally seems very solid. Other streaming services have definitely caught up a bit and are much more reliable then in the early days, but my impression still has always been that Netflix is a step above the rest technically.<p>This sure doesn&#x27;t help with that impression, and it hasn&#x27;t just been a momentary glitch but hours of instability. And the Netflix status page saying &quot;Netflix is up! We are not currently experiencing an interruption to our streaming service.&quot; doesn&#x27;t help either...

In 2012 Youtube did the Red Bull stratos live stream with 8m concurrent users. We&#x27;re 12 years later, Netflix fucked up.

It&#x27;s incomprehensible to me that Netflix, one of the most highly skilled engineering teams in the world - completely sh*t the bed last night and provided a nearly unwatchable experience that was not even in the same league as pre-internet live broadcast from 30 years ago.

This topic is really just fun for me to read based on where I work and my role.<p>Live is a lot harder than on demand especially when you can&#x27;t estimate demand (which I&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s a lot easier to predict like a baseball game &#x2F; NFL game.<p>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&#x27;t put it past them.

This Serrano fight is just an insane display of excellence.<p>If anyone was waiting for the main card to tune in, I recommend tuning in now.

What do you think were the dynamics of the engineering team working on this?<p>I&#x27;d think this isn&#x27;t too crazy to stress test. If you have 300 million users signed up then you&#x27;re stress test should be 300 million simultaneous streams in HD for 4 hours. I just don&#x27;t see how Netflix screws this up.<p>Maybe it was a management incompetence thing? Manager says something like &quot;We only need to support 20 million simultaneous streams&quot; and engineers implement to that spec even if the 20 million number is wildly incorrect.

I love how I can come to HN to instantly find out if it’s Netflix or my WiFi.

Reading the comments here, I think one thing that&#x27;s overlooked is that Netflix, which has been on the vanguard of web-tech and has solved many complicated problems in-house, may not have had the culture to internally admit that they needed outside help to tackle this problem.<p>A combination of hubris and groupthink.

Main event hasn’t even started yet. Traffic will probably 10x for that. They’re screwed. Should have picked something lower profile to get started with live streaming.

When you step back and look at the situation, it&#x27;s not hard to see why Netflix dropped the ball here. Here&#x27;s now I see it (not affiliated with Netflix, pure speculation):<p>- Months ago, the &quot;higher ups&quot; at Netflix struck a deal to stream the fight on Netflix. The exec that signed the deal was probably over the moon because it would get Netflix into a brand new space and bring in large audience numbers. Along the way the individuals were probably told that Netflix doesn&#x27;t do livestreaming but they ignored it and assumed their talented Engineers could pull it off.<p>- Once the deal was signed then it became the Engineer&#x27;s problem. They now had to figure out how to shift their infrastructure to a whole new set of assumptions around live events that you don&#x27;t really have to think about when streaming static content.<p>- Engineering probably did their absolute best to pull this off but they had two main disadvantages, first off they don&#x27;t have any of the institutional knowledge about live streaming and they don&#x27;t really know how to predict demand for something like this. In the end they probably beefed up livestreaming as much as they could but still didn&#x27;t go far enough because again, no one there really knows how something like this will pan out.<p>- Evening started off fine but crap hit the fan later in the show as more people tuned in for the main card. Engineering probably did their best to mitigate this but again, since they don&#x27;t have the institutional knowledge of live events, they were shooting in the dark hoping their fixes would stick.<p>Yes Netflix as a whole screwed this one up but I&#x27;m tempted to give them more grace than usual here. First off the deal that they struck was probably one they couldn&#x27;t ignore and as for Engineering, I think those guys did the freaking best they could given their situation and lack of institutional knowledge. This is just a classic case of biting off more than one can chew, even if you&#x27;re an SV heavyweight.

It’s insane the excuses being made here for Netflix’s apparently unique circumstances.<p>They failed. Full stop. There is no valid technical reason they couldn’t have had a smooth experience. There are numerous people with experience building these systems they could have hired and listened to. It isn’t a novel problem.<p>Here are the other companies that are peers that livestream just fine, ignoring traditional broadcasters:<p>- Google (YouTube live), millions of concurrent viewers<p>- Amazon (Thursday Night Football, Twitch), millions of concurrent viewers<p>- Apple (MLS)<p>NBC live streamed the Olympics in the US for tens of millions.

Live streaming is hard. Most companies that do live streaming at 2024 scale did it by learning from their mistakes. This is true for Hotstar, Amazon and even Youtube. Netflix stack is made to stream optimised, compressed , cached videos with a manageable concurrent viewers for the same video. Here we had ~65m concurrent viewers in their first live event. The compression they use, distribution etc have not scaled up well. I&#x27;ll judge them based on how they handle their next live event

It will never not annoy and amuse me that illegal options (presumably run by randoms in their spare time) are so much better than the offerings of big companies and their tech ‘talent’.

Utter incompetence from senior leadership at Netflix. They had so much time to prepare for this.

Weird that an organization like Netflix is having problems with this considering their depth of both experience and pockets. I wonder if they didn&#x27;t expect the number of people who were interested in finding out what the pay-per-view experience is like without spending any extra money. Still, I suppose we can all be thankful Netflix is getting to cut their live event teeth on &quot;alleged rapist vs convicted rapist&quot; instead of something more important.

From my experience, it works if your not watching it &#x27;live&#x27;. But the moment I put my devices to &#x27;live&#x27; it perma-breaks. 504 gateway timed out in web developer tools hitting my local CDN. probably works on some CDNs, doesnt on others. Probably works if your not &#x27;live&#x27;<p>edit: literally a nginx gateway timed out screen if you view the response from the cdn... wow

It&#x27;s down permanently for me in India. We have Hotstar, which has a record of 58 million viewers during the cricket World Cup final. Way ahead.

Can Mike Judge please stop predicting everything?

This is probably a naive question but very relevant to what we have here.<p>In a protocol where a oft-repeated request goes through multiple intermediaries, usually every intermediate will be able to cache the response for common queries (Eg: DNS).<p>In theory, ISPs would be able to do the same with the HTTP. Although I am not aware of anyone doing such (since it will rightfully raise concerns of privacy and tampering).<p>Now TLS (or other encryption) will break this abstraction. Every user, even if they request a live stream, receives a differently encrypted response.<p>But live stream of a popular boxing match has nothing to do with the &quot;confidentiality&quot; of encryption protocol, only integrity.<p>Do we have a protocol which allows downstream intermediates eg ISPs to cache content of the stream based on demand, while a digital signature &#x2F; other attestation being still cryptographically verified by the client?

I guarantee this is a management issue. Somebody needed to bear down at some point and put the resources into load testing. The engineers told them it probably won&#x27;t be sufficient.<p>I assume this came down to some technical manager saying they didn&#x27;t have the human and server resources for the project to work smoothly and a VP or something saying &quot;well, just do the best you can.. surely it will be at least a little better than last time we tried something live, right?&quot;<p>I think there should be a $20 million class action lawsuit, which should be settled as automatic refunds for everyone who streamed the fight. And two executives should get fired.<p>At least.. that&#x27;s how it would be if there was any justice in the world. But we now know there isn&#x27;t -- as evidenced by the fact that Jake Paul&#x27;s head is still firmly attached to his body.

I am curious about their live streaming infrastructure.<p>I have done live streaming for around 100k concurrent users. I didn&#x27;t setup infrastructure because it was CloudFront CDN.<p>Why it is hard for Netflix. They have already figured out CDN part. So it should not be a problem even if it is 1M or 100M. because their CDN infrastructure is already handling the load.<p>I have only work with HLS live streaming where playlist is constantly changing compared to VOD. Live video chunks work same as VOD. CloudFront also has a feature request collapsing that greatly help live streaming.<p>So, my question is if Netflix has already figured out CDN, why their live infrastructure failing?<p>Note: I am not saying my 100k is same scaling as their 100M. I am curious about which part is the bottleneck.

Live streaming and streaming prerecorded movies is a whole different ballgame.<p>In fact, optimizing for later can hurt the former.<p>Would be interesting to read any postmortems on this failure. Maybe someone will be kind enough to share the technical details for the curious crowd.

&gt; envoy overloaded<p>That&#x27;s the plain-text message I see when I tried to refresh the stream.<p>Follow-up:<p>My location: East SF Bay.<p>Now even the Netflix frontpage (post login, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netflix.com&#x2F;browse" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netflix.com&#x2F;browse</a> ) shows the same message.<p>The same message even in a private window when trying to visit <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netflix.com&#x2F;browse" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netflix.com&#x2F;browse</a><p>The first round of the fight just finished, and the issues seem to be resolved, hopefully for good. All this to say what others have noted already, this experience does not evoke a lot of confidence in Netflix&#x27;s live-streaming infrastructure.

I thought Netflix engineers were the best and could even do mythical leetcode hards. What happened? Why are they paid half a million dollars a year?

Hell, I’d complaing about Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson as well if I was a boxing fan. Even without buffering issues

Reminds me of Nucleus stuttering during UFC

Netflix has some NFL games on Christmas Day. Wonder how those will go for them.<p>I remember when ESPN started streaming years back, it was awful. Now I almost never have problems with their live events, primarily their NHL streams.

A friend and I, in separate states, found that it wouldn’t stream from TVs, Roku, etc. but would stream from mobile. And for me, using a mobile hotspot to a laptop; though that implies checking IP address range instead of just user-agent, so that seems unlikely.<p>Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were prioritizing mobile traffic because it’s more forgiving of shitty bitrate.

FWIW, works fine for me.

On a tangential note, the match totally looked fixed to me - Tyson was barely throwing any punches. I understand age is not on his side, but he looked plenty spry when he was ducking, weaving and dodging. It seemed to me he could have done better in terms of attacking as well.

Bet they wish they&#x27;d gone with middle out compression

It probably depends more on the ISP than on Netflix. Engineers over in my ISP’s subreddit are talking about how flows from Netflix jumped by over 450Gb&#x2F;s and it was no big deal because it wasn’t enough to cause any congestion on any of their backbone links.

My kid woke me up complaining internet is not working. Turns out he is trying to watch the fight and it&#x27;s not working at all here in India.

I think they must be noticing the issues, because I&#x27;ve noticed they&#x27;ve been dropping the stream quality quite substantially... It&#x27;s a clever trick, but kind of cheap to do so, because who wants to watch pixelated things?

Looks like I’m playing Tysons Punchout right now

I wrote an analysis on doing this kind of unicast streaming in cable networks a decade ago. For edge networks with reasonable 100gig distribution as their standard, these would see some of the minor buffering issues.<p>There is a reason that cable doesn’t stream unicast and uses multicast and QAM on a wire. We’ve just about hit the point where this kind of scale unicast streaming is feasible for a live event without introducing a lot of latency. Some edge networks (especially without local cache nodes) just simply would not have enough capacity, whether in the core or peering edge, to do the trick.

Dumb question<p>Isn&#x27;t live streaming at scale already solved problem by cable companies? I never seen ESPN going down during a critical event

Does anyone have any thoughts besides &quot;bad engineering&quot; on what could&#x27;ve gone wrong? It seems like taking on a new endeavor like streaming an event that would possibly draw many hundreds of millions of viewers doesn&#x27;t make sense. Is there any obvious way that this would just work, or is there obviously a huge mistake deeply rooted in the whole thing. Also, are there any educated guesses on some fine details in the codebase and patterns that could result in this?

I don&#x27;t understand why the media is pushing this a Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson stuff so hard and why people care about it. Boxing is crude entertainment for low intelligence people.<p>I&#x27;m tired of all this junk entertainment which only serves to give people second-hand emotions that they can&#x27;t feel for themselves in real life. It&#x27;s like, some people can&#x27;t get sex so they watch porn. People can&#x27;t fight so they watch boxing. People can&#x27;t win in real life so they play video games or watch superhero movies.<p>Many people these days have to live vicariously through random people&#x2F;entities; watch others live the life they wished they had and then they idolize these people who get to have everything... As if these people were an intimate projection of themselves... When, in fact, they couldn&#x27;t be more different. It&#x27;s like rooting for your opponent and thinking you&#x27;re on the same team; when, in fact, they don&#x27;t even know that you exist and they couldn&#x27;t be more different from you.<p>You&#x27;re no Marvel superhero no matter how many comic books you own. The heroes you follow have nothing to do with you. Choose different heroes who are more like you. Or better; do something about your life and give yourself a reason to idolize yourself.

Mine is glitchy, but if I refresh i get a good steam for a bit, then it gets low res, then freeze. If I wait for auto-reconnect it takes forever. Hard refresh and I&#x27;m good. Like, new streams to new server, then overloaded, then does as if their cluster is crashing and healing is rapid cycles. Sawtooth patterns on their charts.<p>And then all these sessions lag, or orphan taking up space, so many reconnections at various points in the stream.<p>System getting hammered. Can&#x27;t wait for this writeup.

Hopefully they fix it because they are hosting two Christmas NFL games this year and if you want to really piss people off you have buffering issues during NFL games lol.

How is this story not on the front page anymore? 375 comments. Seems like a big story to me.

I can feel the pressure on the network engineers from here XD

The arrogant Netflix! They always brag about how technologically superior they are, and they can&#x27;t handle a simple technological challenge! I didn&#x27;t have a buffering issue, I had an error page - for hours! Yet, they kept advertising the boxing match to me! What a joke! If you can&#x27;t stream it, don&#x27;t advertise it to save face with people like me who don&#x27;t care about boxing!

After a few buffering timeouts during the first match, the rest of the event had no technical difficulties (in SoCal, so close to one of Netflix&#x27;s HQs).<p>Unfortunately, except for the women&#x27;s match, the fights were pretty lame...4 of the 6 male boxers were out of shape. Paul and Tyson were struggling to stay awake and if you were to tell me that Paul was just as old as Tyson I would have believed it.

Seems like the magic number was 60 million concurrent streams<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;11&#x2F;16&#x2F;24298338&#x2F;netflix-mike-ttyson-vs-jake-paul-fight-netflix-60-million-households-streaming-quality-buffering" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;11&#x2F;16&#x2F;24298338&#x2F;netflix-mike-tt...</a>

Pure speculation as I have 0 knowledge.<p>Assuming Netflix used its extensive edge cache network to distribute the streams to the ISPs. The software on the caching servers would have been updated to be capable of dealing with receiving and distributing live streamed content, even if maybe the hardware was not optimal for that (throughput vs latency is a classic networking tradeoff).<p>Now inside the ISPs network again everyting would probably be optimized for the 99.99% usecase of the Netflix infra: delivering large bulk data that is not time sensitive. This means very large buffers to shift big gobs of packets in bulk.<p>As everything along the path is trying to fill up those buffers before shipping to the next router on the path, some endpoints aware this is a live stream start cancelling and asking for more recent frames ...<p>Hilarity ensues

Why do they want to get into the live business? It doesn&#x27;t seem to synergize with their infrastructure. Sending the same stream in real time to numerous people just isn&#x27;t the same task as letting people stream optimized artifacts that are prepositioned at the edge of the network.

It was so bad. So so bad. Like don’t use your customers as guinea pigs for live streaming. So lame. They need a new head of content delivery. You can’t charge customers like that and market a massive event and your tech is worse than what we had from live broadcast tv.

I watched on an AppleTV and the stream was rock solid.<p>I don’t know if it’s still the case, but in the past some devices worked better than others during peak times because they used different bandwidth providers. This was the battle between Comcast and Cogent and Netflix.

I thought Netflix’s biggest advantage was the quality&#x2F;salary of its engineers.<p>I think that every time I wait for Paramount+ to restart after its gone black in picture on picture, and yet, I’n still on Paramount+ and not Netflix, so maybe that advantage isn’t real.

i thought they did DSA interviews at netflix what happened? I had to watch the fight on someone streaming to X from their phone at the event and it was better than watching on netflix..if you could watch at all. extremely embarrassing!

One similar crash I remember very well was CNN on 9&#x2F;11 - I tired to connect from France but is down the whole day.<p>Since then I am very used to it because our institutional web sites traditionally crash when there is a deadline (typically the taxes or school inscriptions).<p>As for that one, my son is studying in Europe (I am also in Europe), he called me desperate at 5 am or so to check if he is the only one with the problem (I am the 24&#x2F;7 family support for anything plugged in). After having liberally insulted Netflix he realized he confirmed with his grandparents that he will be helping them at 10 :)

Does anyone remember IP multicast?<p>I remember a lot of trade magazines in the late 1990&#x27;s during the dot com boom talked about how important it would be.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IP_multicast" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IP_multicast</a><p>I never hear about it anymore. Is that because everyone wants to watch something different at their own time? Or is it actually working just fine now in the background? I see under the &quot;Deployment&quot; section it mentions IPTV in hotel rooms.

It’s a learning experience! I remember Conor and Floyd broke hbo and the ufc. It’s a hard problem for sure!<p>Some buffering issues for us, but I bet views are off the charts. Huge for Netflix, bad for espn, paramount, etc etc

They should have partnered with every major CDN and load balanced across all of them. It’s ironic how we used to be better at broadcasting live events way back in the day versus today.

I watched the event last night and didn&#x27;t get any buffering issues, but I did notice frequent drop in video quality when watching the live feed. If I backed the video up a bit, the video quality suddenly went back up to 4k.<p>I had some technical experience with live video streaming over 15 years ago. It was a nightmare back then. I guess live video is still difficult in 2024. But congrats to Jake Paul and boxing fans. It was a great event. And breaking the internet just adds more hype for the next one.

If you&#x27;re going to be having intense algorithm interviews, paying top dollar for only hiring senior engineers, building high intensity and extreme distributed systems and having SRE engineers, we best see insanely good results and a high ROI out of it.<p>All of the conditions was perfect for Netflix, and it seems that the platform entirely flopped.<p>Is this what chaos engineering is all about that Netflix was marketing heavily to engineers? Was the livestream <i>supposed</i> to go down as Netflix removed servers randomly?

It seemed to be some capacity issue with the CDNs. When I stopped and restarted the stream it worked again. Perhaps they do not use real time multi-cdn switching.

It&#x27;s far from perfect here in Canada, I keep having to pause it or go back and then load it again.<p>Oddly having watched PPV events via the high seas for years, it feels normal...

Wow I feel scammed. I paid for a Netflix subscription specifically for this but it&#x27;s not loading so I&#x27;m watching on an illegal streaming website

What a massive blow to NFLX. They have been in the streaming game for years (survived COVID-19) and this silly exhibition match is what does them in?<p>I didn’t watch it live (boxing has lot its allure for me) but vicariously lived through it via social feed on Bluesky&#x2F;Mastadon.<p>Billions of dollars at their disposal and they just can’t get it right. Probably laid off the highly paid engineers and teams that made their shit work.

Honestly you didn&#x27;t miss much, every (real) boxing fan thought of this as a disgrace and a shame when announced. putting a 58 year old Tyson against a crackhead filled with steroids (Jake Paul) ? Either case it would have been a shame on Jake Paul for even getting in the ring with such an old boxer.<p>In boxing you are old by 32 or maybe 35 year old for heavy weight, and everything goes down very very fast.<p>End of rant.

Just adding a data point, here in Canada on my nVidia Shield it went down to 360p a dozen times or so, but never paused at all. I guess I got lucky.

IPTV<p>A see in the comments multiple people talking about how &quot;cable&quot; companies who have migrated to IPTV has solved this problem.<p>I&#x27;d disagree.<p>I&#x27;m on IPTV and any major sporting event (World Series, Super Bowl, etc) is horrible buffering when I try to watch on my 4K IPTV (streaming) channel. I always have to downgrade to the HD channel and I still occasionally experience buffering.<p>So Netflix isn&#x27;t alone in this matter.

Technical issues happen, but I wish they would&#x27;ve put up a YouTube stream or something (or at least asked YouTube to stop taking down the indie streams that were popping up). It seems like basically their duty to the boxers and the fans to do everything in their power to let the match be seen live, even if it means eating crow and using another platform.

Was this their first time doing live content? I figured something would go wrong. I&#x27;m sure lots of people were watching.

I’m not sure buffering was the biggest issue with this event. How was as 58 year old Tyson fighting a man in his 20s?

On X.com someone had a stream that was stable to at least 5 million simultaneous viewers, but then (as I expected) someone at Netflix got them to pull the plug on it. So I would expect this fight to have say, 50 million + watching? Maybe as many as 150-250 million worldwide, given this is Tyson&#x27;s last fight.

We all know netflix was built for static content, but its still hilarious that they have thousands of engineers making 500-1M in total comp and they couldnt live stream a basic broadcast. You probably could have just run this on AWS with a CDK configuration and quota increase from amazon

Streaming live can be a very different thing than on-demand.<p>Hopefully Netflix can share more about what they learned, I love learning about this stuff.<p>I had joked I would probably cancel Netflix after the fight.. since I realized other platforms seemed to have more content both old and new.<p>Then the video started stuttering.

I&#x27;m sure the architecture and scale of NetFlix&#x27;s operations is truly impressive, but stories like this make me further appreciate the elegant simplicity of scalability of analogue terrestrial TV, and to a similar extent, digital terrestrial TV and satellite.

Every time it buffers for me, Netflix does an internet test only for it to come back and say its fast...

All these engineering blog posts, distributed systems and these complex micro-services clearly didn&#x27;t help with this issue.<p>Netflix is clearly not designed nor prepared for scalable multi-region live-streaming, no matter the amount of &#x27;senior&#x27; engineers they throw at the problem.

I’m very disappointed.<p>Woke up at 4am (EU here), to tune for the main event. Bought Netflix just for this. The women fight went good, no buffering, 4K.<p>As it approached the time for Paul vs Tyson, it started to first drop to 140p, and then constantly buffer. Restarted my chromecast a few times, tried from laptop, and finally caught a stream on my mobile phone via mobile network rather than my wifi.<p>The TV Netflix kept blaming my internet which kept coming back as “fast”.<p>Ended up watching the utterly disappointing, senior abuse, live stream on my mobile phone with 360p quality.<p>Gonna cancel Netflix and never pay for it it again, nor watch hyped up boxing matches.

Not enough chaos monkey engineering.

I&#x27;m watching on a &#x27;pirate&#x27; stream because my netflix stream is absolutely frozen.

I thought it&#x27;s only the best of the best of the best working at Netflix ... or maybe we can just put this myth to sleep that Netflix even knows what it&#x27;s doing. The suggestions are shit, the UX is shit, apparently even the back end sucks.

I ended up turning my TV off and watching from my phone because of the buffering&#x2F;freezing. The audio would continue to play and the screen would be frozen with a loading percentage that never changed.<p>I have Spectrum (600 Mbps) for ISP and Verizon for mobile.

Did anyone else see different behaviour with different clients? My TV failed on 25% loaded, my laptop loaded but played for a minute or two before getting stuck buffering, and my iphone played the whole fight fine. All on the same wifi network.

Even people on hacker news do not understand.<p>Internet live streaming is harder than cable tv sattelite live streaming over &quot;dumb&quot; TV boxes cable. They should not have used internet for this honestly. A TV signal can go to millions live.

I would have just made it simple, delay the live stream a few seconds and encode it into the same bucket where users already is playing static movies. Just have the player only allow start at the time everyone is at.

TreeDN: Tree-Based CDNs for Mass Audience Live Streaming <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wRUwsvept-8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wRUwsvept-8</a>

This is Netflix&#x27;s statement on the fiasco<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;netflix&#x2F;status&#x2F;1857906492235723244" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;netflix&#x2F;status&#x2F;1857906492235723244</a>

From my limited understanding, the NFL heavily depends on the Netflix Open Connect platform to stream media to edge locations, which is different from live streaming. Probably, they over-pushed the HD contents.

I&#x27;m watching the event as I&#x27;m writing this. I&#x27;ve been needing to exit the player and resume it constantly. Pretty surprising that Netflix hasn&#x27;t weeded out these bugs.

All your corporate culture, comp Structure, Interview process etc etc is all so much meta if you can’t deliver. They showed they can’t deliver. Huge let down.

This livestream broke the internet, no joke. youtube was barely loading and a bunch of other sites too. 130M is a conservative number given all the pirate streams.

Illegal streams are working but netflix is not. That is crazy.

I did some VPN hopping and connecting to an endpoint in Dallas has allowed me to start watching again. Not live though, that throws me back into buffering hell.

They&#x27;re not used to live. I imagine that&#x27;s it. All their caching infrastructure is there assuming the content isn&#x27;t currently being generated.

Serves Netflix right for killing my beloved DVD rentals.

Guess they should have livestreamed it on X to be safe!

I’m a little amused at folks tuning in for meme &#x2F; low quality personalities doing things … and getting the equivalent production values.

It’s like watching a Minecraft cosplay of the event.

It&#x27;s been fine since 11:00 EST, I wonder if they started using the CDN more effectively and pushed everyone back a few minutes?

Currently trying to watch it and it&#x27;s not loading at all for me. Re-subscribed specifically for the fight.

I watched the whole fight with a 2 minute delay. That was frustrating and it didn&#x27;t help that Tyson lost.

It&#x27;s not lagging for me. It crashed and not coming back.<p>Update: Switched to the app on my phone and so far so good.

Maybe if jedberg and Brendan Gregg were still a part of Netflix, that this wouldn’t have happened.

Nucleix needs to focus on fixing middle-out compression instead of kicking cameras.

Amazon prime streams the Thursday night NFL game and they seem to have no problem.

Sounds like a scene from: Silicon Valley - Nucleus fails<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9IGvzb-KCpY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9IGvzb-KCpY</a>

Why no one mentioned the term “vaporware”? Isn’t this a classic example of one?

I hope they do a postmortem

I thought Hooli was Google, but may be it was Netflix after all.

Works in Australia. Maybe their CDN is under a lot of stress?

So much for Netflix engineering talent aura

Over promised and under delivered. That’s a bad look

This is why we need ipv6. If ipv6 was fully rolled out this livestream could have been an efficient multicast stream like what happens with ipTV.

This reminds me of that scene in Silicon Valley

Shoulda used middle out compression.

Chaos testing, nothing to see here.

Sounds like a job for Pied Piper

They didn’t miss anything.

Ota broadcasts are clearer

Silicon Valley predicted this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ddTbNKWw7Zs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ddTbNKWw7Zs</a>

Working okay for me

Streaming is hard.

Everyone pointing out that their illegal streams, X streams, etc. work fine are kind of missing the point.<p>These secondary streams might be serving a couple thousand users at best.<p>Initial estimates are in the hundreds of millions for Netflix. Kind of a couple of orders of magnitude difference there.

They have absolutely shit the bed here, and of course their socials are completely ignoring it.

People still pay real world money to Netflix after they cancelled and how and why Warrior Nun just to see grandpa being beaten up.<p>I guess in the year when Trump is being reelected this is hardly a surprise.

off topic but.<p>i thought tyson was in eldercare.

I can&#x27;t see the fight right now.

Is this potentially an aws issue?

Looks like shit for me. Buffered a bit as well.

Was this the plot of a silicon valley episode?

yeah i&#x27;m using iptv which is just a rip of NF and its stuck buffering.

I blame RTO and AI

I&#x27;m an engineering manager at a Fortune 500 company. The dumbest engineer on our team left for Netflix. He got a pay raise too.<p>Our engineers are fucking morons. And this guy was the dumbest of the bunch. If you think Netflix hires top tier talent, you don&#x27;t know Netflix.

Why didn’t they use Netflix AI to solve the problems?

Dupe: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42153906">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42153906</a>

How is this not a solved problem by now?<p>I think this is a result of most software &quot;engineering&quot; having become a self-licking ice cream cone. Besides mere scaling, the techniques and infrastructure should be <i>mostly</i> squared away.<p>Yes, it&#x27;s all complicated, but I don&#x27;t think we should excuse ourselves when we objectively fail at what we do. I&#x27;m not saying that Netflix developers are bad people, but that it doesn&#x27;t matter how hard of a job it is; it was their job and what they did was inadequate to say the least.<p>Jonathan Blow is right.