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Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

At one point, Netflix video streaming accounted for something absurd like 20% of all Internet traffic in the country. Regardless of whether it "scaled incredibly well," I would imagine there are still novel issues with that much scaling.

Reliability also matters differently for video than it does for normal web traffic. It's one thing to shuttle 5GB (or whatever) of data over the course of an hour. It's another thing to shuttle 5GB of data with no hiccups for an hour. Detecting and routing around machine or network issues fast enough that real-time video playback is not impeded sounds to me like a difficult challenge.

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"Reliability also matters differently for video than it does for normal web traffic. It's one thing to shuttle 5GB (or whatever) of data over the course of an hour. It's another thing to shuttle 5GB of data with no hiccups for an hour."

Speaking of which ...

I notice that while youtube continues to buffer video while paused, netflix (and many, many other video players online) do not.

So while netflix will auto-adjust quality for you in response to a bad net connection, you can't just pause it, go brush your teeth, and come back with a big enough buffer to avoid skips through the entire video.

When did video players stop buffering-on-pause ? Why was that choice made ?

On the other end of the spectrum is whatever video player showtime online uses - it does not adjust quality and it does not buffer on pause. Basically it was built for perfect Internet connections and nothing else.

Probably too many cases where they deliver a bunch of content while it's paused and then the content never gets played. More than half the people who pause it probably end up closing the tab without finishing the video, so one can save a lot of bandwidth by only delivering the data when it's needed. A totally unsupported hypothesis.

I arrived at the same conclusion when I realised that YouTube no longer buffers the video all the way through to the end on mobile anymore. I miss being able to buffer a (long) video for offline playback when riding public transport.

Ditto, for this case I youtube-dl prior and watch on mobile VLC

> I notice that while youtube continues to buffer video while paused

Not anymore, or at least not for long periods of time.

Beat me to it.

I am sure a large part Netflix's success is how seamless its products are: there's minimal to no loading time and the video stream is virtually always smooth - including during times of action/high frame rate.

Creating a video streaming platform is one thing, but creating a content delivery platform that is effectively as reliable as TV that is also cost efficient is no small task if you ask me...

Bullcrap. The tech is good enough (but not that much better beyond that level). >90% of the success comes from the content creation/licensing strategy/execution and marketing. I.e. non-tech.

At this point it's a bit like arguing that Disney's great success in Bluray sales comes from their encoding/Bluray mastering expertise.

You seem to stumbling into the distinction between functional and non-functional requirements. Netflix spends massively more on content then tech so that's consistent with what you're saying. To use you're Disney example though, yes it would effect their success if they weren't able to deliver their content because their Bluray mastering expertise was lacking.

Exactly. The tech division, while overfunded and overengineered is fulfilling its role in a good enough way.

Tech part was "good enough" for last 20+ years - it's why most companies call their tech teams "IT department".

There is however something about that last 5-10% where moving a few bits around the right way gives you business advantage, over places like Disney.

That said, it does seem like some of this Netflix stuff is overbuilt, although I don't need to run tens of 1000's of ec2, so maybe it's worth it.

Tens of thousands of ec2 instances, none of which served any customer, if you red the article carefully.

> Regardless of whether it "scaled incredibly well," I would imagine there are still novel issues with that much scaling.

I would imagine there is not. When you master something for 1%, you do 20% without too much hassle. (Let's remember that netflix is only serving a couple of videos to a lot of customers, that is embarrassingly parallel and cachable).

About reliability. Video is one of the thing that has the least need for reliability. You can have thousands of hiccup during the hours, doesn't matter, nooone can see any of them.

I expect most of the tech challenges to be in cost optimizations, not in delivering the service.

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