Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days | Hacker News Reader

Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

bbc.co.uk

953 pointstompagenet2744 comments

I've been having major internet issues lately (Seattle area), have had 4 techs come try to figure it out. Yesterday's tech finally correctly diagnosed the problem as happening before the connection reaches our home but was unsure of the cause. He called his supervisor to investigate, and they found that the capacity for our neighborhood's node was nearly at 100%, while ideally it should always be under 80%. Fortunately they said they'll be able to fix it within a few weeks by doing a node split. The tech mentioned he'd never heard of capacity issues before in his ~20 years as a tech and that some smaller ISPs have been having issues keeping their internet up and running at all.

I've been tracking the performance with PingPlotter, if you're curious how bad it is right now here's the last 10 minutes: https://i.imgur.com/AnUqv3j.png (red lines are packet loss) Pretty interesting how current circumstances are pushing even tried and tested infrastructure to their limits.

I’ve worked at a major ISP, for a decade, and spotting something like this should be so easy to spot. There are tools on monitoring of load all the time, and areas are routibely getting split etc. to improve bandwith, so I think your ISP are basicly amateurs..

Alternatively, load has gone up across the board in a short period of time, so that preventive scaling has fallen behind and are in recovery mode.

Yes it can, but why would it take several techs, to spot something like load, which is the first thing you would do, it should take no more than 10s to look it up in a tool.

A "last foot" tech might not even have access to those tools, much less know how to use them.

Rolling out that tech has got to be more expensive than checking the load first.

Dunno how it is in the States, but here in UK rolling out the tech is basically the first thing they do after the unavoidable "have you tried turning it on and off again" phone call. They just don't trust the customer to have any clue and maybe don't want to waste time doing troubleshooting at their end when it's "probably" a downstream issue.

Network Operations should be raising known problem issues to front line call centre staff.

Network congestion issues shouldn't be handed off to field techs to check local loop (last mile) and CPE (Customer Premises Equipment.

I'm pretty sure it's standard practice at these companies to never let front line call center staff acknowledge known problems. Sometimes, the automated phone menu will give you a recorded generic message that they are currently experiencing a service issue, but that's intended to convince you to hang up and patiently wait for them to sort their shit out. I've never had a front-line rep be at all useful in diagnosing a real problem.

Yeah true.

I guess I need to remember the ISP I work for here in Australia (front line tech support, and then network operations physical security and infrastructure) was widely recognised as the best ISP in Australia multiple years running, so I shouldn't use it as a baseline expectation.

So how was life at internode or aussie?

Internode.

Yeah, was a good place to work. I was in their Adelaide data centres when iiNet acquired the company.

In NZ you sign up with an ISP, but your local connection is usually handled by the same physical equipment (DSLAM for ADSL, etc) which is owned by a single network provider.

I’m not sure what the incentives are for an ISP to try to get the provider to fix issues, or even if they would e.g. https://company.chorus.co.nz/what-we-do is notoriously bad for service and the copper network is being deprecated. Locally https://www.enable.net.nz/about-enable/ are doing a good job of service, because they are well subsidised by the government and seem to be effectively operated.

Not amateurs, liars.

So Frontier?

how can i as a subscriber find out whats the capacity?

It used to be possible to determine the downlink capacity and even current usage with a DVB-C receiver and some Linux software, since DOCSIS is essentially just IP encapsulated in MPEG transport streams on a digital TV channel.

More recent versions of DOCSIS have moved away from that layer of backwards compatibility, so you would probably need some specialised equipment, if it is possible at all (I don't know at what layer exactly encryption happens).

The problem is that most companies aren't going to tell you that their peering circuits are running hot or that their internal network or access layers to the end user are running warm at peak. ISPs all do stat muxing and the line is "we make money when customers don't use the service".

They'll be happy to deal with the last mile segment, but anything beyond that is murky and most companies I know aren't going to share much. Helps to have friends on the inside leak some graphs, though.

> I’ve worked at a major ISP, for a decade, and spotting something like this should be so easy to spot

MRTG graph, ISP circa 1995. Colorized.

See a flat line? that's congestion. Now figure out where it is coming from. Sorry, we have been doing this for thirty years so I'm kind of cranky. It is not a rocket science.

> There are tools on monitoring of load all the time

On some days my connection resets 5 times within an hour, which is quite annoying since retraining the connection takes a minute or two. When I call support about it they have zero monitoring in place that would let them know about the recent history of the connection quality, they can only do spot tests of SNR on demand, which of course doesn't show any transient events. According support forum posts of other users they'd have to explicitly enable "long term monitoring" based on user input to get that information.

Of course SNR line quality is an issue separate from congestion, but still, automatic monitoring appears to be limited.

If you didn't know, that 80% number is probably the result of Little's Law. That's the result where if your demand is generated by a Poisson process, and your service has a queue, 80% utilization of the service is where the probability of an infinite queue starts to get really high. People

Here's a nice blog post about the subject:

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/01/30/server-utilization...

This law does not apply to queueing as encountered in routers. It assumes unbounded queues and a poisson arrival process (i.e. a memoryless channel); both assumptions don't hold for packet routers and senders using congestion control (TCP or otherwise).

There is, however, a high chance of encountering buffer bloat if countermeasures are not taken at the chokepoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat

Modern cable modems, for example, are required to implement such countermeasures. My ISP is at over 90% capacity and round trip times are still mostly reasonable. (Bandwidth is atrocious, of course.)

How do you monitor this? The 90% over capacity, would like to see where mine is at

There might be a way using a cable TV receiver (see my other comment on this thread), but in my case, a sales rep of my ISP just told me on the phone.

I have an older modem (DCM476) and it definitely doesn't have this or doesn't have it enabled. I have to use/tune queue management myself on the router side.

Yes, it's mandatory only as of DOCSIS 3.1, and yours seems to be 3.0. (Supposedly it has been "backported" to 3.0, but that obviously would not apply to existing devices certified before that amendment to the spec.)

To add:

If you have more control over or knowledge of your load, you can safely go higher than 80%.

Eg when I was working at Google we carefully tagged our RPC calls by how 'sheddable' they were. More sheddable load gets dropped first. Or, from the opposite perspective: when important load is safely under 100%, which it is almost all the time in a well-designed system, we can also handle more optional, more sheddable load.

As a further aside, parts of the financial system work on similar principles:

If you have a flow of income over time, like from a portfolio of offices you are renting out, you can take the first 80% of dollars that come in on average every month and sell that very steady stream of income off for a high price.

The rest of income is much choppier. Sometimes you fail to rent everything. Sometimes occupants fall behind on rent. Sometimes a building burns down.

So you sell the rest off as cheaper equity. It's more risky, but also has more upside potential.

The more stable and diversified your business, the bigger proportion you can sell off as expensive fixed income.

I've noticed that above 70-80% it gets pretty hard to insure that interrupt timing can be met and balanced with low priority main looping in a lot of my bare metal embedded projects.

Comcast's last mile network in Seattle has been struggling in some areas from the morning until around 4 to 5 PM. It's not massive loss, but enough to disrupt video conference. Run a mtr towards an Internet dest and you'll see loss at the first hop and everything behind it.

Mtr isn’t a reliable measure of packet loss. Routers drop “extra” packets like ping before they drop “paying” packets.

mtr uses UDP data packets, as far as I am aware.

Yes, the ICMP response packets could still be skewed, and the effect you mention is definitely real, but on a good connection, usually there should not be much to drop at all, neither TCP/UDP traffic nor ICMP packets.

>mtr uses UDP data packets, as far as I am aware.

Doesn't matter what it uses (though by default MTR does use regular old ICMP Echo - you have to specify -u or -t to get it in UDP or TCP mode). When TTL expires it still requires an ICMP TTL Exceeded be sent, regardless of whether or not you were sending ICMP through it.

Traceroute implementations in general are probably telling most everyone in this thread a lot less than they think, even without icmp deprioritization being taken into account.

https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/presentations/Sun... is worth a read for most anyone that's ever attempted to use traceroute to troubleshoot networking, because they're almost certainly doing it wrong.

Yes I'm well aware of routers policing TTL=1 packets, but if you see consistent loss all the way down it's usually a sign. This compared to seeing individual spikes on intermediate routers which are usually control plane policing.

The tech was full of shit. This happens literally all the time. You probably won’t get a “node split” unless more people loudly complain. It’s cheaper for them to roll a tech and hope you get fed up than it is to actually fix the problem.

My ISP has been playing the same game with me for months. I finally cancelled the contract when it was about to renew, and I got a very interesting winback call from sales:

Not only did the rep freely share the utilization numbers with me (80% during the day and 90% at night), he also mentioned that things would not get better until end of the year when they would do a node split.

As consolation, they offered me 10x the download speed for half the price. I'm not really sure how that would help congestion...

I work in this field in Spain. Margins in this sector are slim, deployment is expensive. EVERYONE works with simultaneity rates, it's the only way to have cheap connections.

In fiber connections is actually not that expensive to split a fiber after a CTO, you can actually sort of daisy chain it, but you want to keep everything as standard as possible.

Margins are not slim at all in the USA

You think they're fat in the US? Look north.

Shh, you'll upset the Great Robelus[1] and they may start euthanizing animals....

[1] https://www.thebeaverton.com/2020/03/telus-threatens-to-euth...

I'm Canadian, trust me I know and hate it.

Some EU relatives of mine keep their phone plans living here because it's cheaper with the overseas rate than paying Canadian plan rates (!!!)

Maybe being in the system with a higher speed tier gets you higher priority?

I don't see what motivation a tech would have for lying about this.

I asked a Comcast tech when IPv6 would be available and he said “IP v what?”. Don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

Did you ask them ten years ago? Comcast has had v6 for ages.

the point was, i believe, that the techs frequently don't know what they are talking about.

It's instructive I think to look at the job ads for these technicians. It's frequently something on the close order of: can be professional, knows how to drive, can handle close proximity customer service, knows some handyman skills, and oh by the way maybe has seen an Ethernet cable before.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, everyone was entry-level at some point, but engineers who do capacity planning and traffic engineering they are emphatically not.

A lot of techs for large orgs don’t. I had a grid electrician in a while ago, replacing unshielded triple phase from the pole, who was convinced that they only use AC in the US, and that here in Europe it’s all DC, so safer, and this is why I can work on it without shutting it down, mate.

The mind boggles. These people maintain our infrastructure.

Wow, that's wrong on several different levels. I can't even begin...

I understand that you don't need an electrical engineering degree to be an electrician, but still, these are some fairly basic concepts in the electric power industry, especially the safety aspects, so you'd think someone working on live wires would know better.

Honestly, any halfway-intelligent person who travels internationally should know that Europe runs at 240VAC/60Hz, because this is really important if you want to use your American electronics there without a transformer. (When I went to Europe last, I brought my laptop, and an adapter which does not convert voltage, only the prongs, but that's OK because the laptop's power brick says it works on everything from 100VAC to 240VAC, as do a lot of electronics these days. But you have to check this first, you can't assume! Plugging a 120V-only device into this adapter could cause a fire.)

Europe runs on 230V 50Hz.

Yep, you're right.

Luckily, the 50/60Hz stuff really doesn't matter these days except maybe for some digital clocks on appliances.

That's like asking a telephone lineman about IPv6. Diff layer in the OSI stack.

My 67 year old grandpa has vague idea what ipv6 is.

He probably was around when the standard was defined. It's amazing this is taking 30 years to replace IPv4.

The transition is definitely taking a long time, are there additional reasons for delaying the switch to IPv6 other than the mitigation of the problem with NAT/private networks?

It requires cooperation from perhaps fifty thousand organisations (there are 45k ASes that announce more than one prefix, and I'm guessing that there may be 5k software vendors). Some of those have orgcharts that aren't very friendly to this kind of change.

Adding to that, even clueful places may be held back by one or more vendor or provider, all of which need to have working v6 support before you yourself can deploy it.

I thought ipv4 and ipv6 addresses could be provided simultaneously (or rather, ipv6 has provisions to be mapped to/from ipv4); you just wouldn't see any real benefits until you could switch wholesale (because you'd still be limited to whatever ipv4 can do)

That is, it was my understanding that there was no real blocker to supporting it in the interim, except for the lack of any immediate benefit. Though I'm also not clear on whether supportinf both introduces any significant complexity

They can be provided simultaneously, that's the normal case.

Suppose an ISP wants to provide IPv6 besides v4. What does that ISP need? Well, first, v6 from the upstreams, that's simple, and v6-capable name servers, routers, that's simple too nowadays.

But there's more. Suppose that the ISP has some homegrown scripts connected to its monitoring or accounting, written by a ninny years ago, uncommented, and some of those assume IPv4, and noone wants to touch them.

Suppose that ISP outsources its support, and the outsourcing company promises to do the needful regarding IPv6 support but never actually does it.

Suppose that that ISP is in a country where ISPs have to answer automated requests from the police or courts, and one of the software packages involved in that has a v6-related bug. Or the ISP worries that it's poorly tested and the ISP's lawyer advises that if there are any bugs, the ISP will be criminally liable.

And so on. Enabling IPv6 may need a fair number of ducks lined up.

To contrast this, every Comcast tech (3) that's been in my home has been very knowledgeable. Once they see I'm a "geek" they unload with technical knowledge and generally talk my ear off. That's how I learned my town has less nodes/per subscriber than any of the surrounding towns which is why my Internet speed is frequently ass.

Because he wanted you to believe they were going to fix the problem at a later date so he could go to the next job (paid by the gig) and get you to close the ticket (improve his metrics).

> have had 4 techs come try to figure it out

Doesn't sound ideal for distancing.

The way the story is written it sounds like their attendance was there was serial temporal distance involved (they didn't come at the same time)

I mean inviting four different people into your home sounds silly if they're there at the same time or not! I guess people need internet to earn a living though.

How does it come about that the ISPs Network Operations team didn't know they were saturating a link?

Last ISP I worked at would have email and SMS notifications going to On Call staff.

Because the NOCs may not be all that competent. I remember talking to the Cablevision IP NOC back in the mid 2000s about their internal backbone circuits they were running hot that went to a POP we peered with them. I had Cablevision at home and the congestion was breaking my VPN to work. The NOC said "an OC45 was down" (no such thing, it's an OC48) and that congestion is okay because TCP will work with it okay and there won't be a problem. I shutdown the peering session with them force traffic around a diff city (sent it to Chicago). I remember talking to the eng team at Cablevision about their NOC and they had a good chuckle and admitted they're only good for the simplest of operations (link down, go fix).

In some parts of the world running links at 95 percent is okay because look 5 percent left (totally ignorant of buffers or microbursts etc.).

A free alternative to PingPlotter: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality

My connection: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/...

In case anyone is shopping for broadband in the UK, I only have great things to say about Zen pictured above. It's so good I just called to upgrade my 80 Mb to a 300 Mb just for fun, meanwhile my quarantined Italian friends are suffering awful internet now that everybody's at home streaming Netflix.

I used to have Virgin fibre and my average ping was 80ms with a ton of jitter. The plot above is my internet while downloading at about 2MB/s average over the past 24 hours, and surprisingly stays the same even at peak download.

Not friend of yours italian quarantined enjoying 1Gb/s here. Never used Netflix ;-)

That's a neat alternative to PingPlotter. I like that it pings from outside, so no client required. I'll check it out, however, I'm in the US, so I bet it's always going to be high latency.

I’m being pedantic, but that’s not really Zen, it’s the BT Openreach backend which has really great stability and latencies. I tracked my BT Openreach connection for many years and I never got more than a few ms of jitter, really amazing. However the speeds are not great (70/20), and the coverage is also fairly poor - I'm in a dead zone right now between two local exchanges. So unfortunately I'm forced to use Virgin, which has gotta be the worst ISP in the history of the world (and I have had Comcast!). Terrible network and terrible customer service - I don't know how this company exists.

What ISP? I’m on Comcast “Business Class” in Seattle and experiencing occasional slowdowns as well.

Same

Curious, what ISP do you have? Currently moving to a new place in Seattle and have to decide between Wave G or Atlas Networks.

FWIW, the reason nodes typically don't get to 100% is due to something called WRED (Weighted Random Early Detection). As the outbound/inbound queue on your "node" approaches fullness, it randomly selects packets to drop. This signals TCP on the sender to back-off. The closer to full-ness it gets, the higher the probability (weight), so the sender knows to slow down to the slowest link's speed.

I've written more about this problem here [0].

[0] https://rkeene.org/projects/info/wiki/176

Thanks for the write-up!

I wonder how TCP BBR would react here. If I understand it right, it wouldn't need RED to back off: the increased latency of buffers filling up would do that automatically. But BBR also wouldn't let the occasional dropped packet make it back off.

From what I understand about TCP BBR from reading about it the past few minutes, it would compute a new link speed as a result of impacts from WRED and then use that for the connection baseline speed.

TCP BBR would still rely on RED/WRED to compute the connection rate estimate initially, then it would attempt to send below that rate to avoid packet loss. If packet loss is detected it would recompute the estimated connection rate.

I found this page [0] useful, especially the graphs.

[0] https://blog.apnic.net/2017/05/09/bbr-new-kid-tcp-block/

Ho lee sh, that is absolutely crazy.

I am sure its affecting you internet speed, what sorts of tasks are you generally doing now that the entire is state is pretty much on lockdown?

Here in Alberta, although we are told be socially distant, there is no full lockdown and I want to know what kind of issues would I be expecting to run into in the up coming weeks/months?

This happened to me years ago near the University of Illinois campus (UIUC) with Comcast. I had multiple techs come out but they would only come in the morning when the connection was fine. I finally escalated to corporate who finally told me they needed a node split. I made them give me 100% free internet until the split was complete about 6 months later.

When I have connectivity issues during a pandemic I make sure at LEAST 6 techs come to make sure I have perfect connectivity to Netflix and chill.

Thanks for mentioning PingPlotter, I'll try it out to monitor our connexion.

Ping plotter looks like a SaaS https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/smokeping/

Since I have been at home I practically live in MS Teams, with constant video chats. Yesterday I did a presentation with 140 people connecting watching my ppt and camera. That's got to be unusual. I imagine most of my colleagues going through this routine daily.

Makes me glad I went with the Business version of Vodaphone in the UK - which is ironically £1 cheaper a month than the consumer.

I suspect its the services that relay on super low prices and don't have excess capacity Talk Talk etc that are really going to feel the pressure in the UK

You're describing an issue specific to US ISPs. It doesn't apply to Europe. From what I read even before the pandemic the US ISPs offered rather crappy services. In Europe, particularly in Poland, I don't have and haven't heard about anyone having any issues with connectivity right now, even though the country is in lockdown, schools and universities are closed, restaurants work only in delivery/take-out mode, companies switched to remote work, ... And still no issues at home nor at work.

Don't make decisions about the European infrastructure based on American problems.

I'm in Poland as well and I've been working remotely for over three years. Since the lock down started I feel that everything is a bit slower and less stable, but I haven't experienced major issues during usual work hours doing work-related things (maybe except MS Teams acting up). However Netflix is broken most of the time during afternoon hours (when I want to keep kids occupied with cartoons for an hour or so to get things done). Luckily other streaming services work fine.

In contrast, my internet connection finally started working great since lockdowns started. I suspect my ISP (small local company in central Poland) got some additional bandwidth or somehow finally fixed their infrastructure when they saw increased internet usage among their clients.

I work virtually from New Zealand with my colleague in Lombardy Italy. Today I noticed some more serious degradation in video call quality for the first time.

But mostly I'm amazed how well the internet is working given the circumstances.

Having issues with the internet here in the UK today. Unsurprising given that half of the world has suddenly discovered video calling. Mobile network seems more stable.

In my country (NL), a lot of the backbone of both cable TV and internet on a street level has been replaced with fiber already; I can imagine that in the US, due to the scale, this process is lower. Doesn't have to be fiber-to-the-home, 20mbit should be enough for everyone for example.

I haven't had any problems with my internet (I do have fiber straight into my house, wired network on my laptop, fast.com reports 600 Mb/s), but Skype, which we use for meetings, has been pretty shit in terms of sound quality.

20mbit is not enough if you have kids with retina display ipads looking at youtube!

This article is literally about the EU asking Netflix to reduce bandwidth in Europe.

And the comment I replied to was "literally" about problems encountered in US (Seattle is in US FYI).

It depends. If there is competition, things can be good. I live in a place in the US where there are 3 broadband providers, and I pay far less than $100 for a symmetric gigabit connection, and I get it too.

> I've been tracking the performance with PingPlotter, if you're curious how bad it is right now here's the last 10 minutes: https://i.imgur.com/AnUqv3j.png

Is your own connection idle though? Pings are also affected by the congestion on your own router†, especially if you don't have good AQM (such as CAKE). Dumb queues will just drop all packets equally, smart queues will do flow isolation and penalize the bulk flows first while keeping the trickle ones (ping, ssh, voip, ...) untouched.

† and anything else along the path to your ping target

Around the time you posted this, my internet in Seattle was down for near around 12 hours yesterday. I'm not fond of my ISP, but that's unusual even for them.

Paying isn't enough to get what you paid for, so...

https://github.com/SickChill/SickChill - automatically download TV episodes (about Linux)

https://github.com/CouchPotato/CouchPotatoServer - automatically download Movies (about Linux)

https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent - torrent client for downloading your Linux tv/movies...

When you cancel the Netflix service (like I just did, after 8 years), please make sure to specify the reason. There's a form (Go to "Account", then look for a cancel button in the upper left part of the page) where you can enter some text.

I'm pretty sure this text is read by a real human in the end. Each cancellation likely represents a pretty significant loss of recurring revenue on average.

Clarification: This was a total BS move. A French EU politician yesterday tweeted a random idea, with no support (or even any request) from any network provider. They all seem to be saying traffic is slightly higher than usual, but they're coping.

Then Netflix just randomly decides to do this, to everyone in Europe. To me this was the straw that broke the camel's back. Goodbye, Netflix.

Sonarr and Radarr are 10x better.

New here. What's the difference between these two?

https://www.google.com/search?q=Sonarr

https://www.google.com/search?q=Radarr

Sonarr handles TV shows and Radarr handles movies.

Thank you!

Also interested in why they're better?

Linux administration skills are going to be in abundance once the COVID-19 threat has passed.

Might also be a good opportunity for trying out some community and mesh network software.

Just my 2 cents: I tried using Couchpotato for a while and it was one of the worst pieces of software I have ever tried to use. Confusing UX/UI, I never could understand how and when it was actually searching for movies etc.

I switched to radarr[1] and I never looked back. Although I hate having mono installed in my server, at least I can manually perform searches to check if it works until I was satisfied that the "Monitoring" feature actually works. And I find the UI much more understandable too.

I also use sonarr[2], which is also pretty satisfying for me. Although SickChill looks much better and more feature complete; I will look into it when (if?) I manage to get back home.

[1] https://github.com/Radarr/Radarr [2] https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr

Could you explain the principles of these softwares?

Do they basically automatically download the newest pirate movies using BitTorrent protocol? Or there is more?

BitTorrent, Usenet, and more.

Are you using Sonarr 2 or Sonarr 3? Sonarr 3 has a revamped UI.

Sonarr 3 isn't technically stable, but I've been running it for more than a year now and didn't have any problems worth mentioning.

Radarr, Lidarr and some others are all built off of Sonarr.

popcorntime?

What makes you (not you specifically, you in the general sense) think you're entitled to viewing content without paying for it? I mean if you want to make a point just cancel your subscription.

It's such a non-issue that I don't think most people care enough to bother trying to justify it. Asking "what makes you think you're entitled" is a loaded question because it assumes that the people downloading have some sort of opinion on "entitlement" in the first place.

If I'm being seriously honest, it's because all the offers are actively screwing you over. Always have been. I've never, EVER felt good about "buying" (paying for) from large content providers. Or had a feeling the money was being used for good or in a fair way. There is literally no incentive for me. "Ease" might have been an incentive, except I don't tend to pick easy over getting screwed.

Also the current URL for The Pirate Bay is https://tpb.party

And, AFAICT: http://piratebayztemzmv.onion/

Sonarr and Radarr are 1000% time better

Forget installing stuff manually and just install Cloudbox on a server (https://github.com/Cloudbox/Cloudbox)

I have a server in a DC that has been running Cloudbox for about a year now with 0 hiccups. 10 users and ~14TB in Google drive. Save yourself the headache and go Usenet instead of torrents too. Can't recommend this setup enough, it's about as hands off after initial setup as you can get.

A few months ago there was blog post posted here from a guy making movie reviews. In the blog post he described how he managed to get 4k Netflix screenshots on his Chromecast. The effort he made was enormous and involved reverse engineering the Netflix data protocol (I probably worded this wrong).

When doing that he found out that Netflix streaming in 4k isn't actually 4k.

Again not exactly sure how this worked but that was the result. And he put some kind of device between the Chromecast and the TV. And at the end of the post he shared his top movies of the year or in the previous post.

Does anyone know what I am talking about? I've thought about this pist several times in the past weeks.

This one? https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2019/02/14/adventures-in-netfli...

Exactly! I also just found it. Don't know how I didn't manage to find it before. The comments were quite critical.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669234

There's nothing in there about 4K not being 4K, just some griping about low bitrates.

On computers you can access some debug stats https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2fkylx/hidden_netf... and Roku also has it https://community.roku.com/t5/Channel-Issues-Questions/Someh...

I think in the end the author's only complaint was that it was difficult to figure out what bitrate the Chromecast was streaming at, is a pretty minor problem. It reads like a complaint post, but that seems to just be the author's writing style.

You're technially right but conceptually he did show that the bitrate isn't in the normal 4k ballpark.

There's likely little or no benefit on using a 4k resolution at this bitrate.

In his experiment the Chroomecast on wifi gets a ~6 Mbps stream for 4k, which is about 20% of an average quality Handbrake encoded 4k stream. The surprise was that in his experiment Apple TV got so much higher bitrate. Market segmentation?

It's possible to capture the output and analyze the detail so I don't want to hear about what's "likely".

I think this is the one you need. Interesting, thanks for the suggestion to search for it!

https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2019/02/14/adventures-in-netfli...

epic

I did not read the whole thing, but could it simply be that Netflix detects whatever technique the author is trying to use and that something is up, so it defaults to non-4K streaming?

On a related note, if you watch Netflix in Chrome or Firefox then you're only getting a resolution of 720p.

    Google Chrome
        Up to 720p on Windows, Mac, and Linux
        Up to 1080p on Chrome OS
    Internet Explorer up to 1080p
    Microsoft Edge up to 4K*
    Mozilla Firefox up to 720p
    Opera up to 720p
    Safari up to 1080p on Mac OS X 10.10.3 or later

    *Streaming in 4K requires an HDCP 2.2 compliant connection to a 4K capable display, 
    Intel's 7th generation Core CPU, and the latest Windows updates.    
    Check with the manufacturer of your system to verify specifications.

From: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

I really wish they'd just allow up to 4K streaming on all main browsers. The Windows 10 app is awful and very buggy for multi-monitor setups. The two main issues I run into with it are:

1. The video will stutter unless I set both my monitors to the same refresh rate. As you can imagine, it's somewhat annoying to have to lower the refresh rate of my main monitor from 144Hz to 60Hz whenever I want to watch Netflix.

2. When playing in fullscreen on one monitor, the video will randomly minimize if I interact with any applications on my second monitor! So if I want to look something up online or whatever as I'm watching, I have to switch to windowed mode or I risk having the video just minimize and mute itself.

Wow, they should really make that clearer, especially since IIRC they charge for 4K streaming...

This is probably how they get away with providing 4K without destroying their network: by making people think they are getting 4K when most are really are just watching 720p

If you don’t realise it’s not 4K, maybe it’s not worth the extra cost

Yeah, that's why they should say something. I was not aware I was getting lower quality, I thought the movies look awful.

Why are you paying for it?

Exactly, I am not anymore. I wouldn't be at all if I knew it. I'm not watching much and most of the time it's Star Trek TNG or similarly aged stuff, so I didn't realize this might be the case. The girlfriend watches (way) more.

Most people don't watch it on computer monitors, so most people actually are getting 4k. None of this applies to streaming boxes or smart TVs.

You know what Smart TVs do, right?

(I'm just saying, because apparently there were people unaware they are paying to get screwed from all sides at once)

"Wow"

They have only been lying about this since the beginning and never stopped. So has Spotify.

Were you also paying for gold-plated HDMI with built-in virus scanner?

I thought people were voluntarily buying in to this bullshit, because they feel the obligation to financially support the content industry. I mean that's what everybody who thinks this is important is going on about all the time. None of them are seriously arguing you actually get a good deal out of it.

This is really driving me nuts... Netflix is consistently giving me subpar resolution in firefox. It's quite rare that I even get 720p. Yet switching to microsoft edge, boom suddenly it's great.

There used to be some extensions to switch the resolution up on chrome and firefox, but I do believe they're not working anymore.

Another case for piracy I guess.

This is because of DRM integrations. If any part of the chain between netflix and secure memory in your display cannot be verified, or does not meet some standard, you get the degraded experience.

Change user-agent to impersonate Edge.

This is why I won't pay for premium resolution upgrades. It's too much of a hassle to ensure the entire video chain is providing what I paid for.

It's more than that, Edge has far more DRM in it.

> Another case for piracy I guess.

The notion here is, because of these annoying steps and gotchas, there will not be 4k rips of their content floating around. I don't keep up on the piracy scene these days but I have to imagine that it can still be done, as with the setup from the blog. So goes the story of DRM, it is a painful step that doesn't quite prevent piracy - but if you're netflix or other streaming services, you're working closely with the implementors of the DRM tech (microsoft, widevine, others) and you're not going to just throw in the towel given that it's always a work in progress.

Sometimes there are also licensing requirements around having DRM attached, probably applies to Netflix in certain cases (although less and less these days).

I believe this is because Edge is capable of decrypting and displaying DRM-protected 4K streams. I don't think it's just Netflix being difficult.

Requiring draconian DRM that doesn’t work everywhere with confusing and arbitrary restrictions for paying customers IS Netflix being difficult.

If they removed the DRM, they'd get a lot of resistance licensing shows. As long as content-producers insist on DRM, Netflix has to use DRM.

I believe their licence terms are also the reason you can download some Netflix videos to your phone/Windows 10 machine, but not others.

There are also some that can only be downloaded limited number of times (a year). Example - Gotham, at least in my country.

Uhh ... what? What does the word "download" mean in that context?

I mean if you download it once, you have it.

The content Netflix produces itself is also DRM-infested, isn't it? That excuse doesn't work anymore.

That sounds awful.

I'm on MacOS Mojave and the main issue I have with Netflix is that every few minutes there is a white flash for a few ms. In Safari and Chrome if i remember correctly. But I never investigated that as I don't stream a lot.

Note that if you pirate 1080p or 4k content you'll always get the full resolution you asked for.

Not always at a great bitrate though.

I haven't really torrented anything in a while but I doubt there are many 20GB+ Blu-ray quality rips out there that you can download in a reasonable amount of time.

EDIT: after reading the replies I stand corrected; it seems like there are some better quality uploads out there than I thought.

There are plenty, 30-40GB uncompressed BluRay remux rips are very common. Will download in under 15 minutes.

You can also find uncompressed 60-70GB UHD rips.

You'd be very surprised.

> reasonable amount of time

Depends very much on your own bandwidth. For someone with 400Mbps, 20GB+ doesn't take that long time to download in the end, especially popular torrents.

But then again, not many have that kind of bandwidth available.

Availability aside (bluray rips are a thing), most people can’t tell the difference between FullHD and 4K at all, at least in moving pictures[1]. I doubt bitrate will make much difference on top of that, as long as you start from some reasonable value.

I seriously can’t tell the difference between a very low quality YIFY rip and a proper Bluray. If you freeze frame they both look bad, and when they’re moving they both look great. I’ve done this as an experiment multiple times and it’s like judging wine... There’s a threshold you need to pass but beyond that you quickly run into diminishing returns.

[1] BTW most movies are still mastered or partially mastered (SFX) at 1080p still, and even if they’re true 4K you get high quality downscale to 1080p for free. But really most 4K movies are still upscaled from 1080p.

I’d rather see 60-144hz before any increases in resolution above 1080p and maybeeee 4K.

I think lower quality rips show themselves a bit more on high quality playback devices, but I generally don’t hit low quality releases purely for Snob factors so I could be wrong.

Are movies actually made in 144 FPS?

Not that I'm aware of. The only high FPS movie I know of is Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ang Lee, it is shot at 120fps. The Hobbit is shot at 48fps.

No, and that’s my point. 144hz is probably overkill, but 60hz is a noticeable difference.

Movies look like garbage in >30fps.

That's why moviemakers beg audiences not to do frame interpolation.

Interpolation and frame rate are two different things.

Care to give an argument more than ‘looks garbage’? I think people reported that the hobbit looked weird, but that’s likely because were used to 30fps in a subconscious level.

I don't know how much films you watch, but the only thing I'm used to on a subconscious level is what the world looks like IRL.

Using Sonarr you can specify minimum bitrates to download. It fetches content automatically in the background for you.

You can specify, but you can't guarantee that what you want is out there at that bitrate.

Very common.

At least it will be the same bitrate every time :)

The keyword you should be searching for is "remux", as in identical video/audio streams to a BD but in a new container (probably MKV).

If you pirate it originally yourself, sure.

Pirated content from other people that lies about what it is isn't unheard of, though.

Not unheard of, but uncommon. Typically the uploader will list the particulars of his precious file in extreme detail. Video resolution down to the pixel, framerate, mean bitrate and the exact settings and version of the libx264 codec software used...

Unlike streaming services, there is a vibrant competitive landscape in the piracy scene with strong competition incentives on technical quality, with reputation being the commodity.

Depends on your sources!

What a joke. We're punished for being paying customers.

It's like the oppressive DRM that hurts actual paying customers of games rather than the pirates who circumvent it.

This is generally how the media industry works. Paying for content (online at least) is almost always more complex, less flexible and lower quality.

Add to that the various geographical restrictions (have the audacity to live outside of the US? No content for you!) and piracy becomes quite attractive.

Not with music though.

Unless you want to non-English artists. Korean music for example used to be a nightmare on all streaming platforms when I last tried them.

When people say everything is on Spotify, they really mean that everything they know which is Spotify, is on Spotify.

Half the stuff I recommend to people is not on Spotify or Youtube. Thank goodness I had the "entitlement" to build a giant mp3 collection because I have no idea where I'd find it otherwise.

I decided to do that as well, and the fact that artists get literal pennies from Spotify made me completely apathetic towards piracy. I support artists I like through merch and concerts, which is where they make money nowadays.

This started with DVDs that had unskippable anti piracy messages that piracy tools would either bypass or automatically enable skippability.

And shoplifting is also easier than waiting in line at checkout.

That's true as a quip, but what's also true is that piracy flourishes if and only if there are no comfortable means of obtaining content legally. Music piracy was a big thing until it basically dropped dead from one day to the other when music streaming services like Spotify packed all music into one easy subscription. I would also say that movie piracy also dropped significantly when Netflix subscriptions became mainstream (not necessarily in terms of number of available movies, but certainly in terms of market share).

"all music", not by a stretch

more like redefining what people think is "all music"

Also sharing mp3s was sharing our full fucking musical culture with each other. We had WHAT.CD. You could make mixtapes. Copyright vultures destroyed ALL of this and put shit like Spotify in the middle of it, making it the arbiter of what is and is not part of this shared culture. Controlling HOW it is shared, what you can do with it and preventing it from being shared with people not in the paying Spotify club.

The things they did to our shared culture, in the name of "stopping privacy" has cost us SO fucking much.

Microsoft really wants users signed in to a Microsoft account on Windows. One of their main leverages for this is encouraging people to use the app store in Windows, which doesn't fully work if you're just logged in to a local account

It doesn't? Seems to work fine for me...

Also, for 5.1 surround sound, no browser will do, you must use the Windows 10 app. (That's if you're playing from a PC, of course.)

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/14163

> I really wish they'd just allow up to 4K streaming on all main browsers

Do all the major browsers support this?

> Also, for 5.1 surround sound, no browser will do, you must use the Windows 10 app.

Yep, and when you have done that don‘t forget to manually guess and set your video output refresh rate because the Netflix can‘t be bothered to switch and match the output to the frame rate of the content. For movies it’s very likely 24p and you don‘t want to have that interpolated to 60 Hz.

These numbers seem to roughly map DRM "security levels" and allowed resolution levels. Basically, on platforms that support hardware Widevine (or some other DRM product) ie. "strongest security", 1080p+ is allowed, as there is a low risk of the warez Scene™ being able to tap the decrypted media – HDMI splitters that can strip HDCP 2.2 are hard to come by.

On platforms with only software DRM (tl;dr an obfuscated binary blob distributed along your browser that does some form of AES decryption), only low resolution streams are available because there is a good chance some folks somewhere have tooling to intercept the decrypted media.

> HDMI splitters that can strip HDCP 2.2 are hard to come by.

Ask B&H folks. They always have them.

This is a joke. They charge me for "Full HD" and don't deliver it? I just downgraded to the cheaper plan with lower definition. If that's what I'm getting, anyway...

I mean how is this even legal?

Do you watch netflix on a computer in a web browser? If not, this isn't an issue.

Yes, that's why I'm downgrading. I'm on FF.

After diligent conditioning by Netflix, I've come to enjoy 720p, apparently. On the plus side it means I can pay them less.

I'm not a lawyer, but this sounds like valid grounds for a class-action lawsuit.

Their advertising touts their 4K streaming and HDR quality, but then in practice they silently downgrade most non-television devices to HD resolutions and SDR. There's a footnote in some tech support article if you know where to look, that's it.

Under Australian consumer protection law, for example, this kind of deceptive or false advertising is flat-out illegal, and comes with eye-watering fines. Telecommunications companies have had huge fines for saying their Internet is "broadband" when it wasn't qualifying, for example.

If it wasn't such an enormous pain in the arse, I would love to get the ball rolling on a lawsuit, because flagrantly anti-consumer behaviour like this needs to stop.

Look at this this way: If you ask NetFlix about why they insist on DRM, particularly when most of their content is available in glorious 4K on certain pirate-themed bays, they mumble some excuse about contracts with their content providers. However, a huge chunk of their content is made by Netflix!

That's like a self-employed person saying "Sorry, this is company policy. My boss told me I have to do this nonsensical bad thing."

It's just absurd.

There's a pandemic overwhelming the world right now.

You're going to sue Netflix for maybe $1 in damages per user?

Netflix gets to do whatever because there's a pandemic??

> The video will stutter unless I set both my monitors to the same refresh rate. As you can imagine, it's somewhat annoying to have to lower the refresh rate of my main monitor from 144Hz to 60Hz whenever I want to watch Netflix.

This is a Windows 10 bug. Even things like mouse movement in the 60Hz will make the 144Hz stutter. It's especially noticeable in games.

> When doing that he found out that Netflix streaming in 4k isn't actually 4k.

Well, after so many people praising streaming i wanted to check what this means. According to wikipedia the server adapts to the clients bandwidth. So you can get UHD with the quality of mpeg1.

> Does anyone know what I am talking about? I've thought about this pist several times in the past weeks.

Yes. That's why i decided that streaming is not really a solution.

It is really amazing how they are selling crap claiming that they have better quality. Damn, even an AM transmission sounds better.

It looks like he didn't reverse-engineer the Netflix data protocol. What he did is use a HDCP-stripper box to get access to a raw decoded HDMI signal. The HDCP-stripper also had a screenshot function which he used to get snapshots of the video he was playing.

He also monitored how much network traffic was being used while playing Netflix videos to get an estimate of the bitrate that was being played. The 4K videos were consistently around 18Mbps, which is reasonable.

FWIW, you can (normally) get a HDCP stripper from AliExpress for $10. This isn't particularly exotic hardware.

I think you're talking about this article https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2019/02/14/adventures-in-netfli...

The resolution on Netflix is not a useful indicator of anything (other than an upper bound on image quality). The "1080" Netflix for me usually looks nothing like the average FHD encode of a movie through other channels. A Netflix "4k" stream downscaled to 1080p would probably be closer to normal FHD encode quality.

This is not really surprising as most of the audience is very insensitive to quality.

Maybe if we had kept using bittorrent for TV distribution we wouldn't have so much global traffic downloading "The Avengers" for the millionth time, you would just download it from the nearest host (also the way the internet worked before HTTPS, there used to be way more local caching of content being downloaded over and over again)

Except residential upload speeds are usually only 1/10th of the corresponding download speed.

If you’re downloading ten segments from ten different uploaders it can all balance out I think.

Bittorrent can be damn quick. Haven’t used it in a while but it was certainly fast on well seeded items.

Bittorrent would eat all of the available bandwidth if the content is popular enough that there are always new leachers available.

With enough bandwidth Bittorrent would be less efficient than a single stream TCP between the source and destination because of the protocol overhead.

Doesn't really matter though, still means (Slightly oversimplified) that a peer can connect to 10 hosts and not have to download at all from the origin server. Also this simply isn't true in a lot of European countries where upload and download speeds are equal, but that's a different thing.

Can you explain what you mean by that last statement? It does not sound true to me. As far as I can tell (in my country) almost all consumer offers are asymmetric: ADSL, obviously, but also fiber. Symmetric offers are very much for professional access, and typically more expensive.

In Sweden, fiber (which is quite common) is pretty much always symmetric. 100/100 is common, many people have 1000/1000 and there is residential symmetric 10 Gb/s to be had. Asymmetric ADSL and Cable is definitely not uncommon though.

The math still does not work out.

On an 1:10 asymmetric connection, users would need to remain available for seeding 10 times longer than it takes to download (and presumably watch) the film to have a net positive impact on the system.

That's not exactly realistic, considering that a lot of traffic goes to mobile devices where this would outright kill battery life.

And Smart TVs which lack the computational power/storage/memory to serve traffic.

Yeah, but my residential conncetion is 1000/100.

Maybe 10 years ago? I don't know anyone with a connection that badly asymmetrical.

My parents connection in Australia is 100/3.

That's the standard ratio for Spectrum consumer internet. The ratio actually gets worse as you increase the upload speed. They cap out at 35 Mbps upload even with 940 Mbps download.

My Comcast gigabit internet is capped at 35Mbit upload as well.

It's pretty common if your last mile technology is old, e.g. cable internet coax, or copper phone lines for ADSL.

Most Comcast plans in my area come with 5Mbit/s upload, even if the download speed is 15x to 25x that.

Most FTTH connections in Italy are 1000/100 or 1000/300 Mbit/s. I guess most people wouldn't even notice the difference in upload between 100 and 1000 Mbit/s.

My connection is 1000/50 – theoretically.

On a good day, that works out to about 100/2, thanks to my provider vastly overselling their shitty overcongested network as "fiber to the home". (It's just cable.)

So you've got a "gigabit connection" (in marketing terms), yet worst case your upload speed is like that of ADSL. That's unacceptable.

My connection in Germany is 50/5.

Is this cable ???. Mine is fiber and is 50/50.

It's ADSL. Cable is allegedly a bit faster in my area.

230 mb Down/ 5 mb up. Xfinity near Denver.

1000/35 for me. Yay DOCSIS.

why is docsis so slow/asymmetric?

DOCSIS is fine now, but being a cable network supporting legacy systems takes up most of the upload spectrum for any cable ISP.

You can configure cable to use more of its channels for upstream. They just don't because that would hurt downstream and force them to run more cables to make up the difference.

There's absolutely no reason you can't have symmetric cable if cable companies wanted to pay for the infrastructure.

It's not a matter of "running more cables", and not just a matter of cost. They have to complete their IPTV migration, which is a massive project, and has been in progress for years now. They also have to upgrade hardware at every single node, which is a multi-year project. With that also comes brand new noise mitigation problems.

Yes, you can configure it to use more channels for upstream, but only if you cut off television to all of those paying customers, likely losing a lot of subscribers, breaking carrier agreement contracts, lose the advertising dollars, and go out of business before you even get there. You also have to swap out all of their cable boxes, and leave whoever purchased their own box hanging.

As far as I know, no ISP in North America is currently using any DOCSIS 3.1 features for upload, and they're barely taking advantage of the features for download. Moving to OFDMA is the big barrier to opening upload speeds. The protocol supports it on paper, but turning paper into massive co-existing television and ISP infrastructure is not trivial.

I have the most expensive plan available in my area, and my speeds are 24mb/0.768mb

That's not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the IP interconnect capacity between edge network and its peers. If you only have 4x100 Gbit/sec IP sink to Level3 in SEA and your other sink is 100G to NTT, no amount of traffic engineering in your edge network is going to give you more than 500 Gbit/sec of exit and that exit will only be available if NTT has entire 100Gbit/sec that is not congested and Level3 has 400Gbit/sec not congested.

In eyeball networks the bottleneck is not upload. It is traffic being brought into the edge network from upstreams (netflix/photos/etc)

This is a accurate explanation. Eyeballs are inbound heavy and have plenty of outbound capacity (it's also why they don't care about outbound ddos so much...). However it's important to remember that they can easily congest their internal network infra on the inbound.

Wasn’t Netflix originally p2p in some manner? I can’t remember the exact details (and I may be wrong), but I could have sworn their original architecture was distributed in one way or the other.

You might be thinking about Spotify, which had a torrent-like technology originally. Nowadays I think it's fairly limited.

Also Voddler I guess?

Thanks that might be right!

Netflix was never p2p, but BBC iPlayer was when it first launched.

It sounds like it's time for some popcorn.

Would you be so kind to pass some to me? Popcorn that is.

I would never risk suggesting people use the legal app popcorntime to pirate copyrighted material.

What is the advantage over good ol' fashion torrenting?

I guess I'm just an old timer....

Torrenting is on the way out, from what I (as a casual torrenter) can tell. There is just a lot less material available. Maybe it's better on private trackers, but I haven't been a member of one in 15 years, nor would I know how to access/be invited to one even if I wanted to.

Its on the way out for casual use but its still the primary method for enthusiast use, Its the best and sometimes only place to get flac/bluray quality and the only reliable place for console games.

Newsgroups and private indexers are generally the best option these days.

I've stopped using torrents 4 years ago maybe, because I discovered usenet will use up my entire connection for not just the new stuff, but also 10 year old movies/series. I've tested it on a server in a local datacenter to try remote plex streaming. It uses the entire gigabit connection from start to finish.

It isn't completely free like torrents though. You'll need to subscribe to a usenet provider for like $6/month and a newsgroup indexer for $10/year. The $80/year is worth it though. I've got it setup so my series automatically download (Sonarr) and whenever I want to download a movie I usually just look it up myself. I've had it automated in the past (Radarr), but it wasn't really necessary. My download client already renames movies and places them in the right directory anyway.

Its more automatic/streamlined. The app looks like an ordinary streaming website and all the torrent stuff is in the background.

Excuse me, but if the problem is in overloading of local networks, popcorning full-quality vs streaming downsampled might revert their efforts in cutting traffic, which might be for a good reason.

seems to me like there's some concern over the latest edition of popcorntime in its subreddit, so I'd be wary of it for now.

At least in the US, Netflix colocates a box with the most popular content on premises with the ISP, so the last mile could be the bottleneck here.

Yes, it's the same here (Dominican Republic).

As I understand it Netflix has hardware in ISP data centers to do exactly that. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

Large residential buildings (condo and apartments) need a small edge Data Centre in them.

This might be a more realistic compromise.

Maybe if the industry can agree on an OpenConnect standard with some traffic shaping. Then Netflix, Hulu, Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, EA, Disney+, etc could all share the same edge CDN hardware. Then residential buildings, cities, individuals, whoever, could run their own caching hardware that would cache based on downstream demand.

That's quite something when a streaming service can go to the ISP with their hardware...

This is common for any company that operates a CDN. It just so happens Netflix is a big enough content deliverer that they run their own network rather than pay to use someone else’s.

Pretty common.

I was involved in starting a streaming service in SE Asia and the costs of 3rd party edge caching (Akamai etc) were significant. So much so that it made the business model non-viable without work arounds. Eventually we partnered with ISPs and piggybacked their edge caches.

Netflix might have data centers that gets closer, but nothing will ever get as far reaching and close as P2P would. A residential building who are all watching the same movie would only have to download the movie from building <> internet once. Replicate this system on every level (local network <> building <> city <> country) and you get so much more bandwidth available.

Of course there are other considerations and we (humans) haven't worked as much on P2P as centralized systems, so only the future can tell us where the limit is.

> Netflix might have data centers that gets closer, but nothing will ever get as far reaching and close as P2P would. A residential building who are all watching the same movie would only have to download the movie from building <> internet once.

This assumes that residential internet connections act like a larger version of your home LAN.

For all the ISPs that I know about in Australia, all of those connections are terminated within the ISPs network in a central location. This is done using PPPoE/IPoA which is handled generally at the state level.

Even for HFC networks where the local node is a shared medium, you can't get client-client communications.

Perhaps the situation is different for small WISPs, but I can't see it being too different for most people. Happy to learn more if you have examples.

With the NBN, most providers don’t use PPPoE anymore but instead just plain IP.

Every NBN connection goes back to one of 121 Points of Interconnect (PoIs) (which is way too many by the way but was a dumb and misguided decision imposed by the ACCC). At the PoI it gets to the provider through a Network to Network interface (NNI). The provider’s switch that plugs in here is the earliest that a P2P connection could loop back (but only to somebody in the same region, that is, connected to the same PoI), and is also the closest that a Netflix OpenConnect device could be (although it might not be cost effective to rent the rack space there vs. putting it in a data centre in a capital city).

A lot depends on the provider, however, on how they have structured their network. Apparently some do tunnel all their connections back from the PoI to a central location even though they don’t have to.

But for most, I expect the provider’s backhaul to the PoIs in a state would all go back to the capital city of that state, which would then be interconnected to the neighbouring states capital cities (this is what the ISP I use, Aussie Broadband does at least).

I think you are overestimating the capabilities, and potential "savings", of P2P here. For one, OpenConnect already does what you're suggesting at the "city" level since it's sitting in ISP DCs. Second, there are minimal gains in the last mile via P2P, if at all, considering the numerous types of devices streaming. How do you handle TVs that are already memory constrained by the streaming app? Do mobile devices constantly upload and eat up your bandwidth cap? What if you're streaming from a neighbor who turns off their computer? Do you need to refetch data from some distant host? Is that really a better experience? You also run into privacy/security concerns. How do you reconcile hosts that _cannot_ leverage P2P? Do you now need to support a "P2P" mode and legacy/vintage non-P2P mode? This doesn't sound good for the end user.

> What if you’re streaming from a neighbor who turns off their computer?

The default is to download 100% from a CDN somewhere, and P2P that default to the same behavior can’t be a net negative outside of sub 0.1% extra communication overhead. Don’t want to use your upload bandwidth? That’s fine your simply stuck using the same CDN network that’s currently overloaded.

So none of the above are actual issues, a device doesn’t need to stay connected or have the full movie to be useful for P2P. If I start watching some movie while you’re also watching that same movie you can stream whatever is in your buffer to me and that’s a net gain in terms of back haul capacity. I don’t need to depend on anything from you other than what you already sent to me. I can then download from the service bit’s you don’t have and stream them to you.

You're grossly oversimplifying the complexity involved with "streaming" a video. Specifically in the context of a service like Disney+ or Netflix. Additionally how do you "find" that content near you? How do you ensure it is available? How do you ensure it is correct? Who owns it? How do you ensure copyright/drm/licenses are respected? What do you do when it disappears? The gains are incredibly slim, if at all, for the engineering challenges it introduces.

You also confuse "CDN somewhere" with OpenConnect box literally inside your ISP's DC. It is probably faster to get it this way than it would be to P2P it from your neighbor since, at the end of the day, that P2P traffic _must_ go through your ISP and their ISP. It will not, by definition, peer at the local hub. You are _NOT_ on a local network with your building/neighbors/etc. Your communication routes to your ISP and then out to anywhere else, even if that somewhere else is on the other side of your wall.

Even if it was possible. Even if it was slightly faster. Do you really think studio execs are going to be okay with customers hosting/serving their content off their machines? Even _IF_ this was "technically" a good idea, this is a non-starter from the business standpoint.

I don't understand your first paragraph. If I torrent a movie, how does the torrent client know any of the things you mentioned as well? The answer is that the protocol does, along with some tags as to what the movie the file represents, like Radarr and Sonarr do. This would be the same, just on a locked down streaming client.

First, OpenConnect is just a CDN run by Netflix, they could call it bunny protocol it’s just a name. But, they don’t have unlimited boxes at every ISP, in almost every case you can get P2P connections between specific users with lower network overhead than those users connecting to one of the ISP’s data centers.

Anyway, the CDN knows the connections that are on the network because they are what are connecting to it. Segregating based on large scale network architecture is a solved problem, if you’re confused read up on how CDN’s work. What happens inside each ISP can then be managed either via automation based on ping times etc, or ISP specific rules.

In terms of P2P it’s trivial to include 99% of the data for a movie, but not enough data to actually play the movie. It’s codec specific, but that’s not a problem when you’re designing the service. Ensuring the correct users are part of the network is the basic authentication at the CDN node. That’s what’s keeping the list of active users.

As to data validation, the basic BitTorrent protocol handles most of what your concerned about. Clients have long been able to stream movies with minimal buffering by simply prioritizing traffic. Improving on that baseline is possible as you’re running the service not just accepting random connections and you want to be able to switch resolutions on the fly, but that’s really not a big deal.

PS: And yes, some Netflix content deals would create issues. But, that’s irrelevant to their own content and it’s just another negotiation when negotiating licensing, much like allowing content on a CDN in the first place.

> First, OpenConnect is just a CDN run by Netflix, they could call it bunny protocol it’s just a name. But, they don’t have unlimited boxes at every ISP, in almost every case you can get P2P connections between specific users with lower network overhead than those users connecting to one of the ISP’s data centers.

They have boxes in a lot of ISPs.

If “P2P” requires you to transit your last mile to your ISPs POP and then back down to another user, and Netflix requires you to transit to the ISP POP and back out again... has P2P gained you much? In most cases downstream throughput is much higher as well, making the in-ISP cache box far better for most.

P2P has its place but it’s hard to argue its better for video distribution.

Many ISP’s have significantly more and largely unused bandwidth between users vs the overall network. This is often done for simple redundancy as you want a minimum of two upload links if not more. However, it’s much simpler to run a wire between two different tiny grey buildings in a neighborhood than run a much longer wire to another section of your core network. Ideally that’s just a backup for your backup, but properly configured routers will still use it for local traffic.

Another common case is if you want X bandwidth from A to B you round up to hardware with some number more than X. This can result in network topology’s that seem very odd on the surface.

PS: I think you’re confusing what I am saying, this is not pure P2P it’s very much a hybrid model. Further Netflix was seriously considering it for a while in 2014, but stuck with a simpler model.

As mentioned in my previous comment, there are a lot of things that would have to solved and deployed in order for P2P to be 100% feasible. I didn't expect to receive a list of things to be solved right now!

But you do bring up good points, as the current infrastructure (everywhere) is not setup for P2P. In most modern countries (sans US), ISP networks are actually pretty good and cheap, and works fine P2P. Otherwise there are other ways of distributing as well, mesh networks is one way.

All these questions you are outlining are definitely solvable though, just like when these questions arised when we built our current centralized infrastructure. Problem is that P2P networks are not nearly as funded as centralized infrastructure, leading to less people working on actually solving these problems.

Windows 10 and Xbox do p2p aggressively for games and updates

1) Can a cable ISP even route traffic between residential customers without schlepping out to a POP?

2) Where does the upload bandwidth limitation live? Because if it's in the cable modem itself or the nearest upstream connection, this doesn't help much. There is probably much more capacity between the OpenConnect and the home than the home and its nextdoor neighbor.

> 1) Can a cable ISP even route traffic between residential customers without schlepping out to a POP?

Guess it depends on the ISPs implementation but in my experience, yes, some ISPs let you route traffic between residential customers, granted you've setup your router correctly.

> 2) Where does the upload bandwidth limitation live?

In my experience, the limitation lived further away than the residential building, as we hit our own equipment's limits before we hit any other limits.

This is called a CDN, and they are very ubiquitous especially for video streaming services

> Maybe if we had kept using bittorrent for TV distribution we wouldn't have so much global traffic downloading

I don't think bittorrent can compare to the efficiency of traditional TV broadcast, neither cable nor over-the-air. Instead of a packet being for a single destination, it's send once, and everyone just listens in.

You could think about the opposite way: it's good that Netflix was using so much bandwidth because it encouraged network upgrades. Now, when we need to use this capacity for something else, Netflix can flip a switch and it's available. Excess usage for luxuries like 4k video in good times is a way of preparing for bad times.

Ideally we would treat hospital capacity the same way. In good times, everyone gets a private room.

This is also a reason to eat meat from animals fed food for people. In the bad times, slaughter the animals and eat the meat and the feed.

It's changed my perspective on efficiency. There are some forms of inefficiency that can provide a buffer if something goes wrong.

That last line used to be highly internalized by Americans who lived thru the depression, WW 1 and 2, etc.

Yes.

Though Americans were probably least affected by WW1 and WW2 of most war participants. Go ask some people in Russia for a better example.

It's not necessarily inefficiency.

Eg flush toilets are a great time saver. But they use a lot of water.

If we had a drought tomorrow, we could switch to compost toilets. They are more hassle to use and maintain, but use basically no water.

Which one is more 'efficient' depends on the relative scarcity of water vs time.

The difference being that networks and Netflix servers don't cost a lot of money or take up space when they're idling, and/or they can sell the capacity and switch rapidly when they need it, whereas hospital capacity does.

I mean I'm all for having excess hospital capacity (and excess capacity for a lot of things), but at the same time who is going to pay for it?

This has been the problem before cloud computing; companies had to set up servers and the like for the worst case peak capacity workload, meaning that usually they'd only be operating at 10-20% of capacity.

Yeah, I think it would have to be used as a way to get people to pay extra. Like, some private rooms are available for an extra charge, but when the crisis hits, they aren't available anymore?

You missed Netflix's compression. Netflix delivers contents with a way less data with similar quality.

The greatest advantage of torrents is also its greatest disadvantage.

It’s distributed by nature but it relies on a network of computers (peers) to always be available. And given the asymmetric speed of most consumer grade internet connections, most peers tend to be greedy and disconnect from the mesh after the download finishes.

This is where private torrent sites stepped in and encouraged sharing ratios. Of course, most of the “peers” ended up being dedicated servers with symmetric gigabit lines rented from some host in a foreign country.

So in the end it, the patterns shifted back to data centers and “dumb terminals”

Edge caching should provide similar benefits no?

This is pure bullshit. If Netflix won't commit to it's part of the deal (FULL HD and 4K) then why should I commit to my part (13.99 monthly)?

You cannot decide by yourself to lower the quality of your services and keep the price same.

Sometimes I wish I had enough money and time to seek "legal retribution" from these type of situations. I would love for this case to make it to the European Court in Strasbourg.

"The video-streaming provider said lowering the picture quality would reduce Netflix data consumption by 25%.

But it said viewers would still find the picture quality good."

How would they know what I find still good, if I found it still good than I wouldn't have taken the premium plan!! So many fallacies in this way of thinking..

This was basically requested by the EU so we don't run into anymore trouble by crashing the interwebs.

Don't you think it's okay for us to be slightly understanding and forgiving that there are some individuals and companies that aren't simply capable of flawlessly and immediately adjusting to major changes in their realities at the drop of a hat? I'm sure their usage is through the roof, and they probably didn't predict a pandemic with quarantines into their infrastructure improvements modeled around predictable usage.

Also, it wouldn't surprise me at all if ISPs are also feeling a bit of a strain, and are putting some degree of pressure on streaming platforms to lighten their loads if possible.

Just cut the price to match SD plan and everything is OK.

Will Netflix be understanding and forgiving if pandemic would cut our income, so we wouldn't be capable of paying for subscription and started pirating their originals?

> Will Netflix be understanding and forgiving if pandemic would cut our income, so we wouldn't be capable of paying for subscription and started pirating their originals?

Perhaps. Amazon Videos and Pornhub Premium are both free in Italy, for example. I don't see anything about Netflix being free there, though.

The ISPs have been under that pressure for decades and dragged their feet because they had monopolies to protect them.

Getting pity for them when the proverbial fecal matter hits the fan is a big ask IMO.

On Netflix’s side, they sure are in a hard place, I’d wish govs. would foot part of the bill, as it’s directly helping people stay at home.

I think it's times like this where the government should just sigh and once this is over, come back to have a very stern conversation with ISPs.

Unfortunately internet is critical infrastructure, and kicking and screaming "this is bull" doesn't help alleviate traffic.

I'm in Europe, I'm kind of "wtf?" about this, but I get it. I'd rather have lower quality netflix than a broken internet where I can't work from home and have to figure out how I earn my paycheck.

There will be a lot of very stern conversations when this is over...

This position is flawed IMO.

We postpone the hard conversation to get through the crisis. Then after the crisis the hard conversation never happens.

i guess how I take things personally vs how an org takes it, but I don't think it would be productive to berate someone for mistakes made while they're trying to fix/respond to it. At that point what's done is done and all that matters is handling it.

It'd just add to the cognitive load and noise.

But you're right, people also forget to come back and be like "let's talk" - at the same time - given how relatively embarrassing this is for a government (and how economy-critical it is) I'm definite this conversation will be had.

That is because ISPs in Europe are a piece of shit, maximizing profits of their users while minimizing investments in the infrastructure.

This is not about Corona, this is not about "extraordinary situations", this is about European online infrastructure being garbage and now that it's getting really used for once, everything starts to crumble.

Europe has very different regions. Some countries have the best infrastructure, with nearly everyone on glassfiber, while others only have cripled ASDL.

You really cannot make a statement like 'Europe has a poor internet infrastructure', without (i) comparing it to somwhere else and (ii) highlighting the differences in regions.

I mean, I'm pretty confident that everyone in Europe has better internet than everyone in Cuba or Zimbabwe.

Nobody gives a fuck about not being able to watch 4K. They just want to not pay 4K when you can't get 4K.

So.. click the downgrade button?

Click the "cancel subscription" button. Unfortunately none of them take effect immediately.

And trigger a chargeback on the credit card for services not rendered as agreed upon. Pay the 720p fee as a settlement,

You know, for a while I thought “the doors aren’t automatic at the REI” might be the ultimate first world problem, but now I think “I have to suffer through my pandemic passtime shows in standard definition? where are my LAWYERS?” might be in first place.

Remember what the opposite side of the coin is. This isn't a consequence of the virus. This is offsetting the other first world problem of slightly slow internet. There's no greater cause being served here.

This is not "other first world problem", it's an unprecedented situation in which a good chunk of the world's population needs to be kept at home for extended periods of time. Preserving morale is important for preserving social distancing, which is important for dealing with the pandemic.

Not to mention, everyone who isn't on Netflix now is probably videoconferencing. Which also elevates this problem to "important for preserving the economy" level.

You can do plenty of morale-preserving things on a slightly janky connection. And being worried about some visual stutter on your teleconference is solidly in the unimportant problem pile.

Teleconferencing very quickly becomes unusable on a really congested line.

Specially in Germany where the quality of the internet connections is really bad.

There are a lot of vital services using the internet. If internet grinds to a halt because everybody has to stay home watching Netflix, and vital services have their internet access reduced, then scaling down Netflix bandwidth makes sense.

No.

I don't have problem with netflix reducing it. I have problem with netflix not reducing price together.

They're essentially painting themselves in glory AT THE PRICE OF THEIR CUSTOMERS.

I don't even have a problem with Netflix not reducing the price. It think they should take the hit in place of their customers, but whatever, if your problem right now is that you're paying for 4k and not getting it, suck it up.

But really the praise for Netflix is a bit off tone - they're not making any sacrifice at all.

"If you don't get what you pay for, then suck it up."

Remember some Netflix clients pay MORE to enjoy higher quality. If Netflix artificially limits that quality, no matter the reason, then they shouldn't be charging that full price.

Netflix is getting the best part of it: charging the same money, paying less for bandwidth, and they excuse themselves because the EU asked them to do it.

It's the ISPs that should be solving this via QoS, but of course it's the ISPs that have the politicians in their pockets. No commissioner is going to demand them to do anything.

It's a global pandemic right now. Netflix has taken immediate action in a way that matters (ensuring internet access) and has yet to take action in a way that doesn't matter nearly as much (making their high paying customers happy). Yes, you pay more for HD content. But people are dying, so chill.

We pay for schools and our children stay home.

We pay for street maintenance and we're locked in our houses.

We pay for government and elections are being postponed.

We pay for healthcare and people are not getting the care they need.

We keep paying, because if we stop after the epidemic there won't be schools, there won't be road maintenance companies, there won't be a functioning government, there won't be hospitals, because they will have run out of money.

4K Netflix? Suck it up, or feel free to sue them. Courts are in lockdown as well so you might have to wait a few years to get your 10$ back.

Because compulsory taxes that pay for a public good are exactly the same as a private company where users may elect to pay for one of several tiers of service.

The point is that service levels for almost everything are degraded currently due to nobody's fault.

That's not true. Most ISPs are not having congestion problems.

Do you work for netflix or something? these are some heavy comparisons you're making. Netflix is a premium service and they charge a premium rate for it! 15 bucks a month could buy Disney+ too ya know ;)

Are you really comparing public, vital services to Netflix?

I am looking at their plans (at least how it appears in Europe) and the difference between the plans are:

- video quality

- number of screens

I for example play for both differences. So if they reduce only one for me it is still good.

Their pricing plans are not black and white only about video quality. Each plan increases both video quality and screen numbers.

That also means reducing the wages of employees, people not whinig is the only shimmer of hope we have at keeping the economy the same when we emerge from this. Sure, I can't go to my gym, but if we all cancel now, there won't be a gym when I am allowed to go again. At the same time my income might, at some point, also be affect. But, as it is now it is not (yet), so I'll keep it going.

I have to admit I did cancel my 360 euros/month public transport subscription. Their service is also reduce by a lot. So who am I to judge.

Where do you live? 360 euros per month is extremely high for a public transport subscription.

It's an unlimited subscription, because I travel 100 km (back and forth, so 200 total) per day usually (well, I do work at home a lot and on the train itself). It's a life choice, I know. Love the city I live, love the company I work for... Can't choose.

If your gym won't be able to re-open after this thing is over, it only shows the quality of management of the gym as well as of the government. It should not be your burden to bear and build a buffer for them for their mistakes. Someone higher up pocketed all the profits while things were good and is now not ready to invest that money back into it to keep it afloat and that's THEIR problem. They have the money, let them put it back into the economy.

Cancel your membership and stop giving into the bullshit that people are feeding to you. If you want to help, help people, not corporations.

The owner is just some dude, granted he has a nicer car than me :)

In many areas, the gym business was very competitive, and the profits were very small, if any.

It may be that whoever has the deepest pockets survives and others go out of business.

I guess the question is how long they have to bleed money until the customers come back.

> If your gym won't be able to re-open after this thing is over, it only shows the quality of management of the gym as well as of the government.

Yeah, right. So if I am to open a gym, or any other kind of business, I should have it in my business plan that I must have a big enough reserve to survive having my shop closed for months with only days notice. How many businesses do you think will pass that test? I think zero.

Maybe society is more than just the economic transactions that take place and maybe that gym should be opened despite failing this new test, because it is important that we have gyms that keep people fit.

How do you know that they won't repay the additional fee or make up for it in some other way? They haven't even issued a press release about this yet.

Yours is a fun take, which I enjoyed :)

I’m sure we agree that there are legitimate grievances here about consumer rights†, that are worth thinking about.

As the most powerful entities in the economy — not even by virtue of the goods they produce, but by the amount of people they employ and the money they spend — companies like Netflix have to uphold their social contract and be seen to be upholding their social contract!

† In the Netflix example, not the REI example.

So cancel?

People are dying, you can handle a slightly worse video quality.

That's not the point though. My gym was closed and everyone's membership was automatically paused, they don't get to keep charging people.

I'm fine with not going to the gym and I'm fine with a lower Netflix quality. But you shouldn't charge me for a service that you're simply not providing anymore.

Netflix should downgrade everyone's plan automatically or just charge them less.

As i understand they couldn't just charge less or change your plan because of bureacracy and all legal things. What they can do is give free month to all who was affected by this change. Or you could cancel your subscription if you can't live without 4k

"We acknowledge that this decision impacts the quality that our customers have come to expect. We appreciate your patience as we all face these trying times together, and we will explore additional options to make sure our customers are treated fairly and are fully satisfied with our service."

That's basically all they had to say. Something to the effect of "This sucks but it's necessary and needed to be done quickly. We'll try to make it up to you." Then figure out whether to refund people on the higher plans or give them a free month or credit on their account or something.

"This is pure bullshit."

"Netflix should downgrade everyone's plan automatically or just charge them less"

The way it was said in the parent comment was ridiculous.

Again it's not Netflix, It's the ISP that are crying because ppl use to much bandwidth.

And it's Netflix charging extra for extra quality which they now won't deliver.

If they charge everyone the SD package price, noone will really complain. But they will continue charging for a service they're not providing anymore.

It's like food delivery man continuing to charge you for cancelled deliveries because they were found to have salmonella.

Have you by any chance heard of the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure ? You can get out of basically any legal obligation whatsoever if the forces at hand are beyond your control. And COVID certainly is.

This will free up critical bandwidth that will enable more work from home and remote teleconferencing. We can’t increase available bandwidth overnight. It is better to suffer slightly decreased internet speed compared to lots of dropped packets if Internet pipes are clogged.

It's not like ISPs could have build and extended their bandwidth over the last years, for example with the 40 €/month my father pays for < 16 MBit internet connection.

counter-anecdote: i pay 40 euros for 200 Mbit

edit:misspelling

I pay €24,95/month for 1gpbs down / 200mbps up (ftth).

I get 100 MBit for 40 €/month. As mentioned in another comment, it's not about Netflix but doing home office during lockdown, remote work in general and more. People in those "underdeveloped" areas are really fucked, altough they pay the same money that I do. They just don't simply get anything (better) for that.

Where is that? I think internet quality varies quite a lot within the EU, urban vs rural, etc so we can'treally generalise. I pay less than 40eur for a 600mbit connection.

In Germany, 40 €/month can get you anything between <16 MBit (more like 4 MBit where I come from/my family lives) and 200 MBit.

While the infrastructure is quite stable where it has been extended, those rural areas ("not prioritized for broadband builds") are also affected by the lockdown, people have to work from home, use the internet all day etc. pp. In those places, the infrastructure reaches its limits pretty quickly all the time. This will cause _serious_ damage to local businesses for no good reason other than ISPs unwillingness to invest there.

My parents pay a similar amount for 70% of a 16/1 MBit connection. But that is not quite rural, it's one of the richest towns in the country and part of a big agglomeration.

That is not the point. It is what it is right now, and we need solutions that will work right now. Doesn't really matter why, we need solutions now.

After the pandemic, we can discuss the whys, and ,make sure it doesn't happen in the future.

The problem is, now is the only time when something actually can be done. When this overs, we're going back to "everything's fine" until some crisis happens again...

Nobody will do anything once it's over. Nothing more to say.

Are people deliberately missing the point? Netflix kicked everyone down a plan tier, but continues to charge at the original plan tier.

If you get kicked down, the invoicing should match that.

Actually FTA:

> Out of these two, Netflix says it will cut its streaming bitrates.

They aren't cutting resolution i.e. kicking people down a tier. If you pay for HD, you will get HD... at a reduced quality.

During a pandemic which has forced a huge number of people to stay at home and is currently crashing the economy and costing hundreds of lives per day, it could help to be a little more sympathetic to measures like this. They might not be perfect, because everyone is having to react so quickly to what is going on, but we can appreciate that this is not a normal event and the vast majority of companies have never planned for it (random ISPs, for example). If this article [1] from Netflix is to be believed, 4K uses five times the bandwidth of HD, and is surely an easy target for something that can be traded off while not affecting people's moral wellbeing too much.

Suffering a video quality decrease would seem a small price to pay for not causing further problems, and perhaps once this is all over, or at least we've stopped flying by the seats of our pants, we can see if people should receive refunds of a few dollars a month.

[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306

Except, people are PAYING for that upgrade.

You can't fix stupid.

It's amazing how wonderfully liberal and thoughtful people are with other people's money.

Two or four euros per month. Call the army! I would start a class action suite. /s

This stupid selfish attitude is not helping. Netflix will probably issue a statement that they will refund all those affected. And if you don't like it, downgrade! You probably have plenty of time if this is an issue for you.

What I am telling here is, if you are unable to meet the criteria that you are getting paid for, then you need to refund the difference. They are not doing that.

It is not about being selfish here, think more about it.

It's quite sad to see such an attitude in these difficult times.

It's not like Netflix is struggling though this pandemic. Their subscriber numbers are probably skyrocketing right now.

Saying "Internet infrastructure can't handle the current load, we have to restrict service" is fine, but you would expect them to do right by the customer. Not announce the cuts via national news outlets, see how much backlash they get and then decide if they should make concessions to their paying customers.

well it's sad for people to be in favor of netflix. as others pointed out, netflix will probably make a huge amount of money within the timeframe of the virus.

thus reducing the quality for people that PAY for that quality without reducing their invoice is basically a scam. especially because of the pandemic people are short on money. of course people could just downgrade their subscription, unfortunatly some people are not that tech savy as others, so they do not even know what the news is about.

NOW NOW NOW!!! WE WANT IT NOW!!! /s

Give them some time! They just decided this.

The attitude of excusing any behavior in a mass panic while shaming those who call out dodgy behavior is only making this entire thing much worse.

If two or four euros is so little as to be entirely negligible, and if anyone who would care about throwing such a small amount of money away deserved to be ridiculed, why does Netflix ask for it? They could just let the customer keep the money since it doesn't matter, right? If fact, everyone could just send me this silly sum that doesn't matter and they shouldn't complain about.

Exactly, this is less than a single one of the overpriced Starbucks coffees that those same people probably purchase without spending a single thought on it.

Being empathetic to these measures is the right call, although I do find that much more important for brick & mortar businesses than Netflix.

> Two or four euros per month.

Times a million or 10 or 50. Add to that the 25% savings on internet egress, which last I checked was still how commercial internet is financed.

The cost of actually providing the content to the consumers is on the ISP which hosts an Open Connect box.

I agree it would make sense for Netflix to give discount to the subscription for the duration of this measure.

You're so understanding.

I'd like to sell you a subscription service if you're interested?

While in principle I agree that luxuries like Netflix should be secondary to core internet services, at the same time I'm worried about the slippery slope that is net neutrality.

I mean we've had a lot of slippery slopes recently, things like the government Demanding access to location data. I never agreed to share this information with my government. I did not agree to have my ISP or Google or etc to share this data.

Couldn't agree more, I have the HD Netflix account and I literally couldn't give a flying fuck if they drop to SD.

I'm far more worried about my mum than whether TV is SD for a month during a global pandemic.

Fuck me people are ridiculous at times.

It's not either or...

> I would love for this case to make it to the European Court in Strasbourg.

Strasbourg is the European Court of Human Rights. Complaining to them about a lack of detail in your Netflix stream during a pandemic will probably not give you the results you want.

You do know that EU begged them to do it right ? So they will be thanking them not suing them.

They are doing EU a favor, with this one.

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/brussels-in-talks-with-netfl...

[2] https://www.engadget.com/2020/03/19/eu-netflix-sd-streaming-...

Any business-customer agreements can be overridden by government mandates in an emergency. So no, this is no bs.

This might be the most entitled thing I've read all month.

You might even be more entitled than the toilet paper hoarders.

Reducing quality is fine, but they should reduce the price in line with that.

How is this not completely fair?

It's fair but the way they wrote it is not.

There are a lot of people responding so I will answer it this way for visibility.

I HAVE NO PROBLEM with Netflix reducing video quality. What I do have a problem with is Netflix KEEPING THE PRICE THE SAME.

If my local gym chain (Gyms4You) can freeze memberships for EVERYONE and not price it in than Netflix can atleast do the same regarding the "premium" plan.

I understand that this is an unprecented crisis, but that doesn't mean we don't have to follow the rules which we are able to follow without risking our health and well being.

You are free to cancel your Netflix subscription or take less quality plan, Netflix is not doing this because of their backend, They are doing it because ISP requested them. Alternative would be something like ISPs throttling Netflix themselves.

Before ranting on HN, repeating the same point that's made 50 times in this discussion, how about giving Netflix time to respond?

The operations department won't have had the authority to give a €4 refund to everyone overnight (in Europe). They're probably working from home. See what happens i a few days time.

Defending Netflix here is asinine. They have handled this communication poorly, plain and simple. All they had to do was acknowledge that cutting bitrates might raise concerns about the quality of the service and the amount they charge and that they would look into it.

This is a brand image issue and is exactly the type of issue that should escalate quickly to the CEO if necessary.

From what I'm reading in the article, they're cutting the bitrates and not the resolution. This would mean they're still serving you FullHD/4K but with worse quality.

From a quick search, I can't find any guarantees on what bitrates Netflix will serve you. In fact, they already use variable bitrates that can differ per episode of a series.

I don't see your legal retribution having much chance of succeeding.

If this is important to you right now, cancel your membership, right now. Others will happily share the bandwidth you relinquish (says someone who just set the bandwidth limit to "LOW" because my kids are not in school as are hundreds of other households in my area. They couldn't care less about the quality.)

Exactly; vote with your wallet, not comments on HN.

You have to sit at home and watch Netflix in SD, whilst there are people out there literally putting their lives at risk to save others?

Poor you!

Did nobody read the article? There are so many comments here about going to SD, but FTA they aren't reducing resolution, rather just the bitrate:

> Several factors influence how much data is used when streaming a movie online.

> One of them is video resolution, including whether a video is high-definition (HD) or ultra-high definition 4K.

> Another is bitrate, which influences how clear and smooth videos look when streamed online

> Videos with a higher bitrate tend to look less "blocky" or pixelated, but use more data.

> Out of these two, Netflix says it will cut its streaming bitrates.

I'm not sure that the quality lowering already started but the last two movies I watched yesterday and today had really poor quality. I mean they definitely seemed like an average pirated torrent not the HD content I'm used to see on Netflix.

My internet connection is fine tho. Still low latency, no jitter.

I look forward to reading about this comment on n-gate.

Dude, this was asked of NetFlix by the European government, it's not something they are doing by themselves...

https://www.politico.eu/article/brussels-in-talks-with-netfl...

I read yesterday that someone managed to hack Netflix' data packets and discovered their 4K is not actually 4K either; if that is the case, they're liable for false advertising.

> Sometimes I wish I had enough money and time to seek "legal retribution" from these type of situations.

I also used to brood over “if I had infinite money” revenge fantasies. They lost their appeal when I realised the answer is the same in all cases: “if I had that kind of money, this wouldn’t have bothered me”.

I don't think that's necessarily true. Governments routinely fine companies (and people) small amounts of money. They do not need it; the fine isn't about them getting money. It's about deterring people from negative behavior.

In some cases, bailouts make sense. In the ISP industry, they don't make much sense. ISPs were offered a monopoly and operate their networks at approximately 95% profit. Now there is a crisis and they've been spending that 95% not on network upgrades, but on dividends or stock buybacks, and it's all blowing up. I don't think the governments need to subsidize that. The Internet should be bad during this crisis so that people are motivated to fix the problems after the crisis. Asking one content provider to subsidize them doesn't help anything in the long run, and if there isn't pain now, this will all be forgotten after the Coronavirus issue.

Things like the airlines are different. They bought multi-million dollar jets with the assumption that they'd be in the air 22 hours a day. Now they're on the ground, and the financials simply don't work under those conditions. That is the the kind of thing society needs to insure against (if they want air travel, anyway, which does seem to be quite useful).

In the end, I'm very cynical about all of this. Sometimes I wonder if the whole "flatten the curve" thing is being promoted because it's an election year and when your whole family dies from COVID-19, you're a lot less likely to show up at a rally to eliminate Obamacare. We need to cover our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears to think the status quo is OK, so here we are. People will invest a lot into maintaining the status quo, be it healthcare or shitty ISPs.

> Governments routinely fine companies (and people) small amounts of money. They do not need it; the fine isn't about them getting money. It's about deterring people from negative behavior.

That’s not a personal revenge fantasy. Your post is unrelated to my point.

It's $€2 per month difference. You still get part of the benefits, such as access for more devices. While I'd appreciate getting those €2 honestly I find it pretty small minded if that's your first concern. They were asked to reduce load to avoid issues for vital instructure and all the people working from home. I appreciate and am grateful that they followed this request. It's for the benefit of all and if they save a few € in the process there really is no reason to be upset about it.

Where is 4K a 2 euro per month difference?

>I would love for this case to make it to the European Court in Strasbourg

Are you seriously implying that this is a human rights issue? Because that's what the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is for.

If you're talking about the European Court of Justice in Luxemburg this does't really make sense either but at least somewhat.

I unsubscribed, when I learned they don't deliver the proclaimed resolution to Linux browsers. How about you warn me about that beforehand? They know my Browser's fingerprint. That's just a scam.

There seems to be a big divide between two groups:

One is of the mind that we should be empathetic and since it's not a lot of money, people shouldn't complain.

The other is of the mind that, Netflix can certainly take those actions but shouldn't pass those costs on to the consumer.

I'm in the second camp.

In Holland, all the big gym companies still charge their memberships even though the gyms are closed. Since they're legally required to refund the money, they hide that from the consumer and get ahead of it by offering to 'give' consumers their own money back on their membership card. Thus not losing any money.

I think that people in this thread don't have a problem with the measures being taken, but specifically with companies not eating the cost and trying to pass those on to the consumer. That's the shady part and it's not right IMO.

I also find it fascinating that people don't have an issue with paying for services that they didn't receive if they're on a subscription yet they wouldn't pay an invoice should their favorite club(s), restaurant(s), etc. start sending them those.

While I'm open to having my mind changed, all of these practices do strike me as kinda unethical. It appears to me as taking advantage of the user in order not to sacrifice revenue and I think that that's what most people here are objecting to.

edit: My perspective on companies whether the P&L of a company should be taken into account.

I don't believe so.

I think people should be given the option to make an informed decision. Actions like these feel like they're purposefully designing a choice architecture such that there's an asymmetric information flow that can be taken advantage of to serve one's own needs as a company. That's unethical IMO; not unlike a shady 20th century used car dealer.

The divide I have seen was between people who didn't mind as long as they got a reduced rate and people who, at least on the surface, seems to complain that they get lower quality than they are used to and this could easily be solved by ISPs just giving everyone more bandwidth.

Your post makes me think that maybe 99% are actually in the Just Lower The Charge And It's Fine camp, and everything else is either a vocal minority, or due to miscommunication and a desire to be outraged.

Could be. My perception wasn't so much, people being irritated due to lower quality but rather being annoyed that they still needed to pay $X while not getting what they're paying for.

I personally think most people are in the If Lower Charge Then Okay camp. From what I can tell it's specifically the feeling of injustice that rubs people the wrong way.

Hard to draw a line, but there's a key difference between Netflix & gym memberships/restaurants/… for me:

Gyms are forced to close, and are losing money in the process. As a consumer, I can sympathize with the situation. Netflix is having issues because they are thriving, not because they're having a hard time.

Yes, that's a fair distinction I had considered. But personally, I'm not objecting to the measures being taken but specifically to how they're handled.

I think people should be given the option to make an informed decision. This feels like purposefully designing a choice architecture such that there's an assymetric information flow that can be taken advantage of to serve one's own need as a company. That's unethical IMO; not unlike a shady 20th century used car dealer.

This was requested by the EU, not their own decision. NetFlix has historically always had more than enough capacity, it has always been ISP's that are lacking with bandwidth.

Well, in this case I don't see why a customer should stick with the ISP if it doesn't deliver. In Germany, there are several examples where the termination of contract was judged as being okay if the bandwidth regularly fell below 50% of the promised capacity [1].

Therefore: Although the Netflix cut was triggered by the EU, it might actually have been a successful lobbying action by the ISPs.

[1] https://praxistipps.chip.de/internet-recht-dsl-geschwindigke...

But switching your ISP will take a week at best, likely multiple.

Right now politicians don't want me to enjoy the perfect weather outside but instead to stay indoor and play online games or program something. Both I'm less likely to do if my neighbors clog my internet by watching ultra hd streams, apparently.

Don't think "the market will solve it" is best approach right now.

Also, I want my gym to be open after this crisis so I am still willing to financially support them until I potentially lose my own income.

Especially for local brick&mortar businesses I do not understand the, in this context, egocentrical "why should I pay you for something I cannot use" mentality.

Nobody here asked for this crisis and we should all support each other as much as possible. People lives are already being destroyed by the necessary measures taken.

It sounds nice when you put it that way but do you actually do this? How about if you thought about buying a new house, a new car or maybe a new gold ring? Would you still do this after the crisis hit? I doubt goldsmiths will see people buying as much as they used to and I see no difference in that and supporting the local gym. If anything the smaller shops should be supported more than the big ones.

I'm with you. The average everyday person is going to bleed because of all of this.

Forget letting some massive billion-dollar company get a break. If they can't deliver what you are paying for, you should get a discount on your next bill or some kind of compensation.

I realize Netflix might not have control over the situation, but in the end, they'll be ok. While the average person will not.

Yes, I feel the exact same way. I think it's unethical to pass those costs on to the user. At a very minimum, they should at least be given the option to decide.

E.g. 'We can give you a refund OR you can choose to support us right now. If you do we'll give you a free upgrade to XYZ some later time this year.'

What will average person lose? You are really exaggerating this...

A good proportion are losing their jobs, unable to pay their rent. These things won't even magically come back after the crisis. A lot of businesses are going to go under.

What?? Netflix isn't doing this for Netflix, they are doing it for their customers. They are helping to reduce the congestion for Internet users who are using far more bandwidth than they typically do. This is to everyone's benefit. Netflix traffic represents a hugely disproportionate amount of internet traffic, and they are being responsible by recognizing that and reducing their footprint.

But Netflix systems are totally capable of handling this surge, It is ISP who are getting their Internet Pipes getting overfilled, They have requested Netflix to reduce there bandwidth for temporary respite. If anything you should be taking that refund or discount from your ISP.

While I absolutely get your point, Netflix is the service provider here, they exchange that data for money.

If I order from Amazon and Canada Post refuses to handle my parcel, I will have my money back as Amazon fails to deliver, because they did not account for Canada Post not shipping.

I guess I am in a third group that feels that the mob-mentality has taken over. If Netflix indeed decides to just go with this, I too will think they should be called out. But unless I've missed something, they haven't communicated anything about that yet, positive or negative. The outrage right now to me looks like people shouting at firefighters "who's going to pay for that waterdamage?!" while the fire is still active (ok, I should be careful with the analogies on HN, you don't need to pedantically tell me all the differences between netflix and firefighters!).

I feel that it's quite likely that they will announce that they will pay back the extra fees, or make it up in some other way. I can appreciate that it was not their first order of business when the request came from the EU (and, as far as I can tell, Australia as well and probably other places).

I agree with you that maybe we should wait to see how this plays out before we judge their actions. I've never had a situation yet where waiting for a more lucid picture was a bad move.

Unrelated but I love this 'I've never had a situation yet where waiting for a more lucid picture was a bad move.'

Good advice in general.

Yeah, that's a very fair addendum. My line of reasoning was based on the proposition that Netflix would roll with that.

If they don't then that would invalidate the proposition, rendering all that stems from it moot.

In Canada, a lot of gyms simply pause the membership (or offer pro-rated refund) while everything is shut down. Seems scummy to do anything other than that!

There’s so much that seems wrong about this.

1: home network capacity used to be at peak around 7PM IIRC. There should be significant spare headroom on the network during the working day.

2: Netflix already downgrades when bandwidth is limited. The smart move would be to tell Netflix to downgrade more aggressively, on the theory that would allow more “important” traffic to get priority, while still allowing people to watch Netflix (important to keep people from social contact!), and not affecting quality for consumers where ISP capacity isn’t an issue (edit: added clause).

3: Allow individual ISPs to ignore agreements and bandwidth limit Netflix traffic from their POPs, if ISPs are having capacity issues.

This seems political, possibly pushed by Netflix so they can sell more subscriptions while having a third party to blame for reducing service levels. Or maybe just knee jerk dumb reactions from politicians - stupidity seems like an option too!?

Edit: I keep being amazed at how consumerism drives side benefits. Without Netflix and gamers, how much worse off would we all be right now?

Regarding point 1, I imagine capacity is much higher during working hours due to so many people working from home.

> home network capacity used to be at peak around 7PM IIRC. There should be significant spare headroom on the network during the working day.

That's because people used to be in the office over the day. Now many are working from home and thus at home all day.

> There should be significant spare headroom on the network during the working day.

Remember that essentially every kid in Europe is home from school right now.

> Netflix already downgrades when bandwidth is limited.

It downgrades when bandwidth constraints and congestion start bothering _it_. By the time all the Netflixes which are competing with you do so, your Zoom conference will be long gone. Netflix is quite tolerant of an unreliable network. Many work-from-home things, VC in particular, less so.

Re 1st point: and kids are often heavy bandwidth users in evening. Network bandwidth is mostly about supporting peak usage, a pipe with capacity per second and not a fixed volume per day. Plans often regulate by volume cap, but high capacity networks regulate by bits per second peak usage.

Re second point: you are misquoting, and making a point that is obvious. The next sentence is "The smart move would be to tell Netflix to downgrade more aggressively" to help your canonical zoom conference (which is a super poor example - apparently Zoom failure is due to Zoom and not network capacity).

While the widespread zoom problems are due to issues with zoom, highly latency sensitive applications like VC will be degraded before a Netflix client even realises anything is happening on a network reaching saturation. It's very hard for the client to be a good citizen in this situation. Network-level QoS would help, but is a massive moral hazard (and generally illegal in the EU, anyway).

What is "network-level QoS"?

The opposite of net neutrality.

> I keep being amazed at how consumerism drives side benefits. Without Netflix and gamers, how much worse off would we all be right now?

Oh, I'm over here wondering how much these consumer activities contribute to climate change.

I guarantee you that a switch from activities which use gasoline and aviation fuel, to those which use wall power, is a net positive for CO2 emission.

Yes, I suppose it would work like that when you set up a false dichotomy.

Not a false dichotomy at all.

People have about 18 hours in a day to do stuff. Basically all of it has a carbon footprint.

Which do you think is higher: commuting to and from school/work and using electricity for eight hours, or just the using electricity part? Flying to a business meeting, or conducting it with videoconferencing?

The answer is obvious. Also, this is exactly what responsible climate activists advocate for: shift activity to lower total emissions, and electrify everything which can be, while titrating off fossil fuels and ramping up renewable electricity.

Sent from a house with solar panels on a bright and sunny day.

> 3: Allow individual ISPs to ignore agreements and bandwidth limit Netflix traffic from their POPs, if ISPs are having capacity issues.

This goes against net neutrality, and it's a slippery slope. We have fought to keep net neutrality (and in the US that fight was lost iirc).

Are there any illustrations of the volumes of traffic that are being sent through core networks for netflix? I was under the impression the vast majority of traffic was served at the edge.

I think that's what they are relieving...edge traffic volumes. If the local ISP cache box lowers it's maximum quality, the ISPs get relief.

The ISPs oversubscribed, and can't deal with this many people being at home all at once.

Citation needed. In the UK...

"UK broadband companies say they can cope with increased demand as many more people stay at home during the coronavirus crisis."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51870732

That's what they say now. Give them a few weeks and they'll start squealing. Every ISP oversubscribes for consumer segments. In the UK I guess not enough people are quarantined.

That has changed somewhat of late. With WBC there's no more "fixed" contention ratios and you pay for the last mile and then peer at national aggregation pops.

It's a far cry from the 50:1 IPStream product.

Some ISPs like Andrew & Arnolds don't oversubscribe, but they dont have unlimited plans either

It's not true to say that A&A don't oversubscribe. Instead the situation is that they're happy to buy more capacity to fulfil their offer, within reason.

If A&A subscribers could in theory move 10Tbps (if they all simultaneously did some sort of download from a hypothetical unlimited source) but in reality they never do and it peaks at something like 100Gbps, A&A are fulfilling their promise by ensuring they've got 100Gbps to do that.

Typically you'll never notice the difference, except on your bill, because if they had 100x more bandwidth upstream they'd pay a lot of money for that, even though it was unused and they'd have to pass that to you in the medium term.

However, the reality is a little closer to oversubscribing. Suppose A&A are paying for 10Gbps on a particular port somewhere, and at their busiest time of the week it typically runs at 9.8Gbps. Unfortunately the company selling it only wants to offer 100Gbps as the next step up, for five times the money. Another 10Gbps port isn't an option as there are no 10Gbps ports free. So A&A decides to sit on the problem, nobody is suffering at 9.8Gbps.

Next week it hits 10Gbps and seems likely it'd have gone to 11Gbps if that was possible. Oops. The firm they're buying that capacity from still has 100Gbps available, but they agree at last that they could add more 10Gbps ports, and will do so for the same price as the existing port. Unfortunately it means buying a new Cisco router, which Cisc says is on back order, it'll arrive in July.

Are A&A going to throw five times the money at the problem for this burst of maybe 30-40 minutes per week? Or are they going to tell you sorry but it'll be July and until then bandwidth at that peak across that particular link isn't what it ought to be? They're going to do the latter. Because at the end of the day it's a business. RevK is a good guy, but he's not looking to bankrupt the company to make some point.

> In the UK I guess not enough people are quarantined.

A bit of that, and also probably a bit that their network needs and expectations, even when self-isolating, are lower than in the suburbs of tech-intensive Seattle.

Isn't this article about all of Europe though?

The very first line of the article

> Netflix will reduce the video quality on its service in Europe for the next 30 days, to reduce the strain on internet service providers.

emphasis mine.

A broadband company as referred to in the parent comment is an internet service provider.

1. This is EU-wide, just because one or two broadband companies in a specific country said so doesn't mean they all can handle it.

2. I have doubt that any broadband company would openly admit to not being able to handle the extra load.

> 2. I have doubt that any broadband company would openly admit to not being able to handle the extra load.

Thank you! Found this entire thread very odd.

I think that's a porkie, I am with Vodafone (Openreach) and it's completely crippled.

Log onto the internet at 1900hrs in central London on any normal day and be in for a shock

Well if the companies say so

Just note, in your service contract the measure of whether service is working or not will likely be limited to being able to reach your ISPs website. As long as you can do that, it’s just the vagaries of the internet, other providers you know.

Wow, they SAY they can keep up, that proves nothing.

This question turned up a few hours ago over here [0]. Apparently some ISPs are perversely hostile to peering.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22627764

They are incentivized to attempt to charge for paid peering. It’s not that perverse, unless you like the internet going fast more than you like money.

It's perverse because it's harmful to both Netflix and the ISP's customers. The only reason ISPs get away with it is because they hold a monopoly on their user's internet access. If ISPs were subject to competition it would be a no brainer to host a Netflix cache within their network.

Normally when both sides are truly peers, they have valuable traffic to offer to each other, so their mutual payments would mostly cancel out.

Likely some ISPs see themselves as offering more valuable traffic than their competitors striving to peer.

That's exactly what I was wondering!

With my (relatively small) Cable ISP in an affected country it obvious to me that any Netflix content gets served from very close to the edge, with higher bandwidth and lower latency than almost any other content from the internet.

The last mile does not appear to be close to oversubscribed either, as indicated by my firewall which tracks RTT to the first hop (which is interestingly trending down compared to the past weeks) and the occasional speedtest that never drops below nominal bandwidth (200 Mbit).

If anything it is low latency livestreaming content (i.e. Youtube, Twitch, Mixer) that should be throttled, particularly over cellular networks. I assume it's a matter of scale.

What firewall do you use that has that?

I know Ubiquity’s routers/gateways support this.

Not Netflix specific but Cloudflare posted some interesting stats a couple days ago: https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-shoulders-of-giants-recen...

There aren’t, because this isn’t a problem with Netflix. It’s a problem with cheap ISPs that have gotten away with overselling service because most of their customers didn’t actually use it.

Is this for the entirety of Europe? Because I imagine we're not having any issues with this in Finland.

It's a made up problem. In Germany, journalists asked the network providers and they said everything is fine.

Such a ridiculous and pointless thing to do by the EU. Especially since all the apps drop the quality automatically anyway if the connection is slow.

I think the point is to protect things like remote desktop, zoom, etc from being pushed out by netflix traffic.

Isn't that mostly a QoS issue?

The Internet doesn't have QoS.

Last mile networks do.

Yeah, but nobody trusts ISPs to prioritize traffic; that's what the decade of net neutrality discussion has been about. If they start prioritizing Zoom over Netflix now, it just opens the door to continuing that prioritization (for pay) after the crisis.

I'm not sure if I buy the argument that doing something weird during a state of emergency is a valid cause to keep doing it outside of it.

@Hamuko you don't need to buy it, the ISP owners will quickly buy that argument for you :)

And the EU can then take action against the ISPs. The EU hasn't been particularly hands off.

Try tunneling things thru VOIP packets and see if you notice a difference

in these times where a significant amount of business is done from home it becomes a national issue pretty quickly.

Sounds like an ISP issue.

Here in Berlin my DSL connection has been awful since the social distancing began. And many of my friends have complained of similar problems. Frequent disconnections, broken up zoom calls. Though ironically the streaming has been fine from both Netflix & Amazon.

I've had disconnected Zoom calls here (Netherlands) as well, but it seems that's just Zoom not being able to handle the traffic because Google Hangouts and MS Teams are both fine. And Netflix and Disney+ are also working fine.

Didn't MS Teams already go down once due to the additional traffic in Europe?

It could be that they don't have local edge servers in the Netherlands, we are using Zoom very heavily here in the UK and its working well with our colleagues here and in the US but some European countries including Netherlands are breaking up or disconnecting. I think Zoom are using AWS.

If streaming works, but zoom doesn't, maybe the issue is with the zoom servers?

I’ve had other disconnections and sporadic complete DSL outages during the day. It might be there’s more traffic during the day when people are performing work duties from home.

Netflix might also be good enough at queuing up downloaded portions of the film ahead of time that the brief outages don’t affect the viewing experience.

Rather the differences between protocols employed. Streaming video can be sent in chunks where latency doesn't matter that much (within certain tolerances, of course.) Realtime voice and video doesn't have that.

I think Zoom has been having some issues. In Ireland, I haven't seen any actual Zoom breakages, but the maximum resolution I'm now seeing is 640x360. A week ago if someone had a decent webcam it would do 1080p.

What ISP? Maybe they have bad peering because they use peering as a revenue source (cough Telekom).

It wouldn't surprise me if there is a problem, on Netflix's side.

As in this puts too much stress and thus too high of a cost on their end.

It's not an invented problem. In Spain, ISPs like Telefonica and Vodafone are posting tweets are telling newspapers that people need to use the Internet with responsibility [0]. They also passed a law yesterday that allows ISPs to close connections if they know they're being used to spam the network.

Maybe in Germany is different because people are more used to work from home or just being at home while watching Netflix but Spanish people like to go out a lot and now the network needs to serve all these people as well.

[0]: https://www.xatakamovil.com/movil-y-sociedad/operadores-se-u...

"the internet" from a dedicated fiber line is not the same as "the internet" from a oversubscribed 3G cell tower in the same country.

Running better/more aggressive last mile QoS in the affected regions would make more sense to me, though I can see the advantage of netflix throttling "voluntarily" because this approach may avoid net neutrality violations.

They're talking about a 50% increase in voice and 25% in data on mobile networks. The problem is not the wired home connections. In fact, they even suggest that you use your landline for talking instead of the mobile networks.

Would any ISP actually openly say that it's "not fine"? Are these publicly owned companies? Wouldn't be risky to your business if you admitted things are not fine or that they are on the edge of capacity?

German ISPs to public: "Everything is fine!"

German ISPs to EU representative: "Could you please ask Netflix to turn down the traffic so we don't look too bad?"

Not too hard to imagine, is it?

More like German ISPs to EU Representative: oh noes we got caught overselling remember when I gave you all that money now please ask Netflix to slow down

it is a no cost request for a government official to make and gives them a ready out should things go wrong, in that they can point and say "if only they had done what I asked"

No issues in the Netherlands either, we have a lot of cable (250 or 500mbit) and fiber (similar speeds) connections so I guess they're used to this amount of traffic.

I guess this kind of thing is more for rural DSL lines in other countries? Or maybe central London :-), they still have a lot of homes only connected by ancient copper telephone cables.

There are definitely somes issues here. Upload and download speed have gone down since last week, and everyone in the (virtual) office has problems with MS and AWS from time to time. And schools have hardly started...

When I had my Internet from Cox here in Phoenix and they started to invoke data caps, I was forced to rate limit my TVs here in the house.

I have to say, Netflix does a GREAT job making sure their content works well under lower bitrates as compared to HULU and Amazon Prime.

I was getting pretty good 1080 quality at 2.5mbs. If I didn't do the caps, Netflix (and other services) will stream as fast as they can.

I have Cox in Rhode Island, ostensibly 150 mbps but meanwhile my TV buffers on simple medium quality content. I am wondering if the apartment building's connection isn't prepared for so many streamers?

Does anyone know of public ISP dashboards that show used/total capacity on their network in terms of customer usage?

I'm sure its trivial for an internal employee to pull up solarwinds or whatever, but I'd be curious to see if these ISPs are merely running above normal, running hot, barely hanging on with intermittent "isp brownouts" etc.

This is probably a pipe dream but not gonna get any questions answered if I don't ask.

ISPs don't publish that information but some IXPs do. They are not running at saturation.

The largest backbone in the world publishes statistics:

https://www.de-cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statis...

For clarification, this is not a "backbone" - it is an exchange fabric.

Thanks for clearing that up!

And for further clarification, you won't see much Netflix traffic there because the big ISPs have Netflix caches within their infrastructure.

Yeah, you will not see the additional hundreds of Gbps of "internal" Netflix traffic, but you may very well see smaller increases as small ISPs that aren't approved for "full rack Netflix appliances" pick up Netflix traffic over the routeservers.

The big German ISPs don't have Netflix caches within their infrastructure, which might be part of the problem here. Last mile infrastructure might be even worse though.

Germany is rather odd compared to the other countries with its adoption of broadband tech - for example you see a decent bit of FTTH/FTTx in NL, NO/DK/SE (muni owned, early adopters), etc.

Then you go to Germany and it's mass of DSL (and some areas cable). I wonder what happened or why?

Not an expert on the topic, but IIRC this is the rough outline:

- The main ISP of Germany is Deutsche Telekom, a formerly state-owned company that was privatized ~25 years ago, which Germany still holds stock in

- In the past Telekom was awarded big contracts to expand broadband access across the country

- Telekom is/was really slow at fulfilling those contracts, and at the same time behaves in an anti-competitive manner towards any independent ISPs that try to fill the void

- The government doesn't punish any of that behaviour like they rarely do with a big German company, even more so with privatized ones that they have a stake in

To also be fair towards Telekom a bit, Germany is a very decentralized country, which is a boon in a lot of situations, but also challenging for any infrastructure projects. Part of the contracts was that they also have to expand broadband access in all rural parts of Germany.

I'm not sure that's (entirely) it. I don't know if this is why Netflix doesn't do it, but Germany doesn't have the same First Amendment laws as the US. In particular, there are some writings that are illegal under German law. Thus, locating a box in Germany that could potentially hold material that is illegal under German law is ill advised. That the box is operating simply as a local cache doesn't seem to change the lawyer's perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#Re-unifi...

Akamai has hundrads of cache boxes at German ISPs, including at this one.

There are some issues at play here:

1. This ISP in particular has extremely weird peering rules, they only do paid private peering (more expensive than other transit providers) and even deny access to Tier 1 networks. For a long time YouTube was almost unusable due to weird routing - they even had a website explaining why YouTube was broken (Google doesn't want to pay crycry). Same with several popular gameservers. Due to their market position they are completely fine with being the bully.

2. They have their own streaming and TV offer so they don't have many reasons for making the Netflix experience better.

This information might be outdated, I don't live in Germany anymore and it seems that they now have some sort of partnership with Netflix.

in 1981 the (west) german government passed a law that over the next 30 years a nationwide fiber net should be established. sadly, in 1982 when helmut kohl (a conservative) became cancelor these plans were scrapped. instead we got cable tv. one reason was cost of course - cable was 60% cheaper than fiber. another much darker reason was: the public tv back then was, from a conservative standpoint, very leftish (e.g. shows like "monitor" or "panorama"). the conservative leaders couldn't control public tv, but they could open the gates for a nationwide private tv sector. and they did.

The CTO of de-cix recently gave an interview regarding the current situation. They monitored the situation in Italy, put some upgrades in place earlier than originally planned and are not worried about a 40% increase within the next four weeks.

https://www.golem.de/news/internet-traffic-de-cix-sieht-kein...

Thanks. I dont see there any anomaly. Just one higher spike and than normal transfer. So... There is no increase?

Netnod, one of the largest IX in the nordics, has public stats here: https://www.netnod.se/ix-stats/All.html

Don't know about any ISPs that do this.

I would love to see this too. Anecdotally I have certainly been noticing a difference in the general behavior of the internet recently that I can only attribute to the sudden stress on the network.

Here are the AMS-IX stats: https://www.ams-ix.net/ams/documentation/total-stats

Here is for intra isp connections in Norway [1], but it does not really show "netflix" usage as most isps deliver the videos from a local server.

[1] https://www.nix.no/statistics/

That explains a lot. Fair enough though

> But it said viewers would still find the picture quality good.

I beg to differ and I'm watching on my tablet in bed and it reminds me of the Avi files we used to watch on lan networks in the 90s.

Are you in Europe? I'd love to know how are services like Hulu or YouTube holding up?

Hulu is a US exclusive service.

YouTube is unfazed.

Bulgaria. YouTube is King still. To my knowledge, Hulu is a US only thing so...

Gotcha!

On totally unrelated news, Popcorn Time 4.0 was recently released and using it is decriminalized in many European countries (but not in others, so stay safe):

https://popcorntime.app/

What is the advantage of this over simple old torrenting?

you can start watching immediately as it is downloading and it has a player built in, whereas the traditional torrent client needs to finish the video first and you need a separate video player.

Most torrent clients have a "download in sequential order as far as feasible" feature, addressing the first issue.

It's generally a good idea to download the first and last pieces first when doing sequential downloading to ensure that the file doesn't appear too corrupted.

Also, always using sequential downloading isn't very good for the swarm; it means that disproportionately fewer seeders are available for the later chunks of a torrent.

I'd recommend downloading the first episode or two sequentially, but downloading the rest of the torrent normally (or perhaps just first/last parts first).

it seems that popcorn time 4.0 is something to be wary of for now, at least that is the impression I got from the subreddit.

Treating Europe as a one block seems like very low resolution decision. Netflix content delivery network is sufficiently large in Europe to take into account much smaller areas.

Yes, I doubt this was a very well-informed request by the EU as much as a PR move. I doubt the fiber between me and Netflix's edge cache at my ISP is significantly more saturated due to more people staying at home.

You might have missed it but yesterday it was all over the news that the EU had asked Netflix to do something. Here is one of many articles: https://www.engadget.com/2020/03/19/eu-netflix-sd-streaming-...

Today the Australian government is making the same request.

Isn't this sort of rationing exactly the thing that anti-Net Neutrality advocates have been warning about?

There might be special circumstances afoot.

I don't think so. This is one company reducing the quality of their own content.

No, that would be the ISP playing "you can't use Netflix or Zoom unless you pay for Super Premium." This is the services themselves downgrading to handle the highest peak service they will ever see.

Not just that. Eyeball network ISPs also shake down companies like Netflix with extortionate fees when peering points are overloaded to upgrade the connection.

Net neutrality is the idea that your ISP shouldn't deprioritize content from someone else in order to benefit their own competing service.

For example, Comcast not counting their on-demand, over the internet, streaming against your data cap. Whereas watching Netflix/hulu/etc would count against it.

Can't tell if that "anti-" should be there or not...

This drives me fucking mental.

It's not about being insensitive about the quality reduction, I KNOW PEOPLE ARE DYING, I KNOW that's more important than Netflix.

I don't care if they stop ALL services, but DONT FUCKING CHARGE ME THEN.

Well if 'doing your part' only means 720p instead of 1080 or 4k at the same price for a little while, I think that is more than acceptable

I don't get this.

It's not that I'm unwilling to donate a few bucks or take a hit for this situation. I have helped as much as I can.

I still don't think its acceptable for Netflix to decide to charge me the same for a worse service.

Why do people equate dissatisfaction at a large entertainment company charging for something they are not delivering with being insensitive??

I don't care if they reduce quality, stop the service entirely and cease to exist, but don't charge me for something you're not delivering.

I'm happy if they want to immediately cease all online video, just don't fucking charge me!

If this move saves lives GREAT!

Just don't CHARGE ME as if you are still delivering the contracted product.

I don’t understand that. It’s not like Netflix is saving lives or is a non profit. Why should it be our responsibility to subsidize their baseline? The nature of business is that you’re taking risks. Offloading that risk to your customers is bad taste. Netflix doesn’t share its profits with its customers so why should we be shouldering their losses/subsidizing them as paying customers?

Precisely.

Interesting counterpoint to the "broadband is so much better in Europe" trope. Unless of course we are under strain here in the US as well....

The US response has so far been fairly muted, with a few notable local exceptions. There are a lot more people stuck at home in Europe.

In practice, though, at least in Ireland there's been little obvious problem, though you can definitely see an increase: https://www.inex.ie/ixp/statistics/ixp

Does anyone know if something like this graph exists for the US? I tried googling for one but I’m not sure of the right search terms to use.

It's a neutral exchange. Note that it doesn't give the whole story; really big players like Netflix may have hardware directly in some of the ISPs and bypass the exchange completely.

The US doesn't have many significant neutral exchanges, but here's one: https://www.seattleix.net/statistics/

Possibly, but Netflix do peer in INEX, https://www.inex.ie/ixp/customer/detail/103

They do, but they likely also have equipment in many of the ISPs.

FCC is handing out extra radio spectrum as fast as it can. Took a bunch of white space channels gave them to TMobile. Letting some stay on 3.5ghz little longer before selling it off.

Pretty much all of California is stuck at home, and California has 40 million people... that would be the 8th largest country in Europe.

Shelter in Place is basically just the Bay Area, right? And a lot of people still seem to be leaving the home for work there; notoriously, people are still making Teslas!

Also, California is mostly fairly urbanised and well-off. If Germany was the only place in Europe where people were being discouraged from leaving the home, this would be less of a concern. This is really targeting places, especially rural places, with poor infrastructure.

I am in Los Angeles, and we have been told to stay home except for absolutely necessary trips to grocery stores or doctors.

Also, there are very large parts of California that are rural.

> Census 2000 found California’s rural population totaled 1,876,753 persons

That's about 5%, which is pretty low.

It'd probably be the 6th largest in the eu. Smaller than Italy, France and Spain which all have lockdowns.

Isn't the trope "broadband is better somewhere else" for most places? Anecdotally, most people I know complain about the connection where they live.

Europeans seem pretty proud of their Internet, at least relative to the US, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22631036

As a European, I'm quite happy with my Internet connections.

it's mostly the cost/quality ratio, it's not asia levels of modernity (they seemed to be the first on most things) but it's accessible and stable

on the other hand the web is filled with horror stories emanating from C....st customers.

Moving from Sweden to the US (Florida) I can't say I've noticed much of a difference in connectivity. 100, 200, 300 & 1000MBps is readily available in both places but usually around at 3x the price in the US.

Rural America seems to be an entirely different story.

15M down / 768k up checking in from rural america. I have to stop my camera on video conferences if i want to talk.

Ouch :(

Just checked, and at the address I left in Sweden I could have gotten a 1.2GBps for ~$60/mo, almost what I pay for 100MBps here...

My parents have been trying to get high speed internet for years. They're in a semi-rural, but suburbanizing area. They are surrounded by houses that have cable, but their house is older so it doesn't have it.

They had microwave for a while, but it didn't work in bad weather, and then the trees got too tall. They've finally resorted to paying the cable company thousands of dollars to bring cable to their house. It's such a ridiculous opaque process though that my mom basically has to stalk cable vans in her area and give the tech an earful to get status updates. The good techs know how shitty the process is, and one even gave her his personal phone number. However, it's not his department, so his ability to make things happen is limited.

She made the payment back in November, they got permits in January, and she hasn't heard from them since. I asked about how to get this done on DSLReports a while back, and the answer was to just keep calling them over and over and over, because every now and then you'd find someone with a clue.

I'm probably going to end up dropping $8-10k into a tower and point to point microwave links to two different cities. The ISP i'm on now wants $30K to put fiber in my house, but their network is so bad at the edge that i'd still need to get a loop to something else to get reasonable performance.

I'd still do the tower and resell b/w to recoup some of the costs.

Silicon Valley here. My options are 20/1 DSL or cell. I chose cell.

And my part of Rural America was supposed to have a local government broadband taskforce meeting next Tuesday. The county commissioner concerned won't reply saying whether the meeting is canceled or not though the emergency declaration said county offices are closed to the public. I sent the commissioner a message imploring him to find a way to keep the matter going as there will be an end to this crisis and our decaying, limited, legacy infrastructure that the local broadband incumbent is not investing in is holding us back.

I'm not holding my breath.

There should be a mandate that all new buildings should have Fibre Optic cables laid out just like electronics wires and Water pipes.

Or even just a separate pipe for either Ethernet or Fibre Cables.

I have never heard any body complain about broadband speed from Japan, South Korea or Hong Kong. For parts of Europe, Such as Finland, Norway or Sweden are also mostly problem free.

I then decide look up their average Internet speed [1], and turns out they are all in the Top 10.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...

I live in Hong Kong and I always complain about my broadband speed. I get 1GBPs but actually it's not true, the link to US is limited and is rather small given how many people use it so connections speed outside of HK is around 80mbps much much slower than I had in Europe or Japan.

And the contract is for 24 months minimum, so if you leave the country before the end, you end up having to pay for the rest of your contract.

But, in general, US ISPs are particularly bad in my experience (and worse even than HK)

I feel like when people are arguing that point, they are arguing about broadband competition. In most US markets your choices are not great and/or are expensive, and if you are in a market with limited competition there is often not a reason to invest in the network.

> "broadband is so much better in Europe" trope

Interesting how ISP's outside of the EU are uncapping their data limits all of a sudden..

So when people (me included) say it's better in Europe, its because the vast majority of us are not capped.. In normal times.

Sources : https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/12/21177538/att-broadband-in...

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-follows-optus-with-ex...

I had the exact same thought. I was under the impression that Europe had much more robust broadband infrastructure and a surplus of capacity, compared to the US.

Finland at least has uncapped mobile connections up the wazoo. Also the highest amount of mobile data per head in 2016 at least: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/11448.jpeg

Edit: same for 2018 as well: https://www.statista.com/statistics/956188/monthly-mobile-da...

On average, yes, probably. But both the US and Europe have areas (especially rural areas) with very poor coverage, and in much of Europe most people are staying at home at the moment, to a much greater extent than in the US.

I pay $30 for 250/100 and i live 20 minutes outside a town if 120k in a small community of 25 houses, about 7 km from the nearest store of any kind.

Is that competitive? I have no idea. I could however chose from around 10 ISPs that all have to compete in the network, which I understand is quite rare on the other side of the pond.

Where are you? There are many different deals across Europe; many aren't as good as what you have.

Sweden. Has I lived in an apartment in town it would probably have been 5-10 dollars less depending on where I lived. The city operates its own net with very low costs for large parts of the city

Europe is not a single county, and Internet connections are widely different for a variety of reasons. On one end of the spectrum you have the Nordic countries where the average connection has > 20 Mb/s, and at the other end of the spectrum you have Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus where it is below 10.

There are many aspects of good broadband (Competition, fiber access in rural areas etc). Europe is also a group of very different countries. There are many countries where most rural areas still rely on DSL connections, for example.

'Better' can mean multiple things.

I'm pretty sure you'd agree that paying 1/3rd of what you pay now for the same bandwidth is 'better'.

Is there sufficient idle capacity to handle an nearly-overnight transition to whatever the load is now? I don't know, but suspect most ISPs are going to keep similar capacity buffers - nobody sells end consumers non-oversubscribed pipes.

You will

Such a blanket reduction is stupid, yes.

I've just run four different speed tests and all say that I'm getting ~100/10 which is what my ISP advertises (Virgin Media in the UK)

One of them shows a ping of 27 ms (I think it's normally ~ 10 ms)

It's not a counterpoint. Netflix's actions, from a network perspective are not neccessary, at least not Europe-wide. My ISP is more than able to cope with it. I've been checking at peak times and I can consistently saturate my gigabit connection piping traffic to/from Amsterdam, about 800km away.

Maybe Netflix feels the need for its own business reasons (e.g. it pays for some of its bandwidth and now users are using enough that they're unprofitable) but it's not needed to ensure the integrity of Europe's networks.

Were it necessary, the ISPs can simply shape Netflix and let adaptive bitrate take care of the user experience, the same way mobile ISPs do in the US.

This move is just a solution in search of a problem. We still have better internet than you in ALL places, including mobile connectivity, literally everywhere. I can say fiber to the home 250/250 & coax 500/500 dominate the market. There is pumped up ADSL everywhere country-side. This move is coming unilateraly from a person who doesn't understand internet and woke up and had to be busy with something. Many IX report a slight increase in capacity, from 10% to 20%.

You can't generalise all of the European Union like that.

Fibre to the home definitely doesn't dominate the market in the UK!

Maybe we're far behind the rest of Europe but as we are part of Europe, then it isn't that great 'literally everywhere'.

I was working with a semi-competitor of Netflix a few years back and their tech is great of course, their product offering is amazing, but their real magic is with their contracts with ISP's.

I don't know the details of the contracts of course, but they are likely to get a dedicated bandwidth within the ISP, if that comes under strain, of course, that contract comes into play. So I think it's not just the datacenters involved..

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

The reality is that there is no capacity issue. ISP networks are perfectly capable to handle the demand (spoiler: it hasn't increased much, see public IX stats). This is an attempt to revive the net neutrality debate from big ISPs through the EU. This is about the wish of ISPs to double-dip (be paid once by their end users, and another by the content providers).

Does it mean they’ll pay me back for the 4K package?

Sounds like it's effective immediately, so if you don't like it, cut your plan. No one's on contract.

you pay a month in advance

Well, I hate to tell you the devastating news... you might have to eat the $3 this month.

It’s still bullshit.

While the whole world is trying to deal with the worst pandemic in 100 years, you are going to have to adjust your expectation levels for bullshit.

Yeah, but not this kind of bullshit. How is COVID stopping Netflix from lowering their rates accordingly?

Taking actions like changing billing code requires time and effort.

COVID-19 requires spending time and effort on lots of things.

Everything has an opportunity cost.

Spend time and attention on things that matter.

Considering how often Netflix has jacked up my plan prices, I imagine they already have the billing code in place.

They have raised the rates 4 times in their history, from $8 up to $13... although you can still get basic for $9

Doesn’t seem that often or that excessive.

There has to be code in place for people switching to cheaper plans. It can’t be that much effort to switch everyone to a cheaper plan. Especially for a huge company like Netflix.

> Spend time and attention on things that matter

Like what? Just because there’s a pandemic doesn’t mean every single person in this world suddenly has tons of important stuff to do.

Some people do. Most don’t. For most people, “things that matter” in the context of this pandemic doesn’t go beyond washing your hands and avoiding social contact.

What do you imagine the opportunity cost of a couple Netflix devs moving people to a cheaper plan to be? Millions of deaths? Ridiculous.

The pandemic doesn't affect what are good business practises. I understand that Americans might be more lenient in those terms, but Europeans tend not to be.

are you serious? not offering a refund when you fail to deliver the product is something that makes americans absolutely furious. it's one of the only sacred consumer protection issues here. I've already received billing credits or refunds for every service I'm subscribed to that's halted for coronavirus.

Looking at how bad you let your ISPs treat you, I'm quite serious, I think.

Right now apparently they're treating us a lot better than the European isps. Outside the HN bubble no one is really surprised to hear about a service quality problem in Europe though.

Are they? I disagree. Monopolistic, terrible support, terrible speeds, terrible coverage, terrible pricing.

I also disagree that there's an uniform service quality problem, there really isn't. Such a blanket change is simply stupid.

I assure you that Americans are just as annoyed as Europeans when it comes to abrupt changes in service.

The technical needlessness of this decision has been thoroughly reviewed in this thread; therefore this is just a fear-based decision because of the panic. Why should anyone tolerate pointless moves like this to appease people that are panicking?

I don't think it's a fear based decision, it would without a doubt reduce their costs considerably.

Netflix runs on AWS and while they are paying a special rate they are still paying through the nose.

Netflix is operating at a loss, has a mountain of debt and it's most profitable when people maintain their yearly sub and binge 1 show ever 2-3 months basically the same way gyms make their money you pay for a year, go for 3 weeks in January a week before easter, few more weeks in late May - June and maybe then a bit after thanksgiving.

Also I asked Netflix chat if this will be applied in the UK they told me yes but also told me 2 interesting things.

1) It will not affect all customers all the time, 2) it's up to 25% bitrate cut.

I have a very strong suspicion that what Netflix is doing is basically a population wide A/B study on how reduction in bitrate will affect viewing habits during a time when people aren't likely to unsubscribe from their service.

This will be quite invaluable to Netflix especially if they'll will find out things like different countries and different user profiles may have different tolerances to lowered bitrates.

I don't care if people would think this is a tin foil hat conspiracy anyone who's thinking that Netflix would not have the data profiling how every user reacts to this change which could allow them to tweak bitrates on a per-user basis in the future hasn't seen any of their talks about just how they use viewer data to tailor their service.

If you subscribe to an ISP of a decent size, then most of Netflix content is served directly from your ISPs network. Netflix has servers at edge locations all over the world. They want to serve as little content as possible from Amazon.

I'm fairly sure they don't serve any content from Amazon.

edit I'm pretty confident I'm right: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3427839/ten-years-on--... , https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/netfl...

Netflix is not serving streams through AWS. They use AWS for everything except serving streams. They're spending around 15 billion per year on content, bandwidth costs are far lower than that.

This is not how Netflix distributed their content at all. Most ISPs use their open connect system, which places a Netflix box inside their network. Content is streamed from there, which is cheaper for both the ISP and Netflix.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

It's not a fear based decision. ISP companies sell more bandwidth than is actually available during peak times but because of everybody staying home now their services are oversubscribed creating slow downs or outages.

The ISPs came out and said bandwidth isn't an issue.

Is there a link to the source? (not that I don't believe that but just want to know the details)

All you need is a handful of small court claims to wake Netflix up. They'll spend a magnitude more on sending Netflix employees to represent them, than all these prorated refunds would cost.

Good luck with your small claims case for $3. Hope you brought your $25 filing fee!

The idea of many small claims "waking up" a company is nice in theory, but not reality. In reality, the entity being sued asks the courts to consolidate them into a class action, that's part of why class actions exist, because it makes very little sense to have to play out the same legal case a dozen or a hundred etc. times around the country.

I'm sure a law firm somewhere is already looking to form that "class" and rake in their % of a settlement, and I'm sure Netflix understands that and has factored it into their plans, so it's all a moot point except that at some point in the next 3-7 years you'll get a $5 service credit. Maybe.

Also, most contracts have a "force majeur" clause that would cover this sort of thing. And even if it didn't, if enough businesses start having to modify or breach service agreements in these ways through a world-wide crisis then governments will step in and legislate them out of liability. There won't be too much sympathy for the "victims" of Netflix either. Not from the public at large, especially those who lose friends or family to the pandemic, over someone's pixelated experience of End Game or The Office. I know people who are sick, one closely, and I don't know if they're going to survive. Suffering through SD quality (or worse!) isn't what I concern myself with at the moment.

$3? Where I live (in Europe) the 4K plan is 15.99€ a month. That's $17 USD. I pay less for my phone's data plan!

What's the next tier below that? Now subtract the one number from the other number, it should be less than 15.99.

I'd be pretty sure they'd refund you in Europe?

Aren't we talking about Europe?

Yes. Did they ask for a refund for unused services as part of their cancellation? It sounded more like they were just moaning (my fave past-time!).

The "Europe" qualifier seemed necessary as many people on here aren't in Europe.

Many people here aren't in America either, but from the American perspective:

You have a right to demand partial refunds for service outages. I once spent several hours of my life getting a <$5 credit from Comcast for a day-long outage.

They sent a tech over to install a new router and I enjoyed faster, uninterrupted service for the remainder of my tenancy, so I count it time well spent.

What if it's still 4k with reduced bit rate ? It's not like netflix 4k looks good anyway, chances are you won't tell the difference

> It's not like netflix 4k looks good anyway

I can definitely see a difference between 1080 and 4K on Netflix. Compared on the same internet connection and streaming device in the same house. One 1080 tv and one 4K tv.

That's not what I'm saying. Try to watch a 1080p bluray, even on a 4k tv it looks (much) better than netflix 4k.

I would not compare those two because I don’t even have any type of disk player in my house. My only comparison is Netflix vs Netflix.

My point is, you’re saying nobody would notice the quality difference if Netflix lowered their quality. I think I would notice a bit.

100mbit/s h.265 is going to look better than most anything.

That's truly a good question - they could pull that data quickly and prorate people somehow. Maybe not for a bill already gone out, but perhaps going forward (even if they re-enable it).

I'm not going to knock them for this, given that we're talking about keeping critical infrastructure from being overrun while the remainder of the economy works distributed.

You should not knock Netflix at all. The request came from the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services. Netflix helped out when they were asked to. If Europeans are upset about this decision they need to take it up with their elected officials not Netflix.

It was just a request. If any Netflix consumers have an issue with this they should take it with Netflix.

Yes, a request made on the behalf of all Europeans by their government.

No, in the same way that you wouldn't expect a refund if you personally chose to use less than 4K for a stream. In this case Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, has made that downgrade choice for all Europeans.

Isn't the EU just lovely?

Question to downvoters: does it make sense that every part of the EU gets this degraded quality even if they have competently built IT infrastructure?

> In this case Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, has made that downgrade choice for all Europeans.

They did not force Netflix to do it. Rather, they asked them.

Pretty sure they will have a clause in their TOS agreement to the terms of "we cannot control your ISPs network quality, or regulations placed upon us"

No one has forced them to do so, not a single ISP seems to be having any issues.

Why would they? Do they pay you back when your ISP can't provide enough bandwidth for 4K? How much is 4K on top of regular Netflix service? Is it worth worrying about?

Why would they? Because they charge extra for it and they're themselves have stopped providing this service.

>and they're themselves have stopped providing this service //

Is it them, or is it overselling by ISPs?

There's no evidence the ISPs were overloaded by Netflix traffic recently. Note that this conversation was with politicians, not ISPs.

The EU commission stopped them providing 4k, not netflix

Weren't they told (or asked) to?

Does it matter? If a company is told to stop selling a service by any other governmental organization (e.g. due to privacy or health concerns), they also should stop charging the subscription.

>How much is 4K on top of regular Netflix service?

4 euro a month (or 33% increase).

Man, if I was paying for me Netflix, I’d be upset...

So they are rolling out gigabit fibre in homes but 5mbs is overloading the system?

Everyone's road is big enough to drive to their home, yet if we all got on the same highway at once it would be a traffic jam.

Just because they're selling you Gigabit, doesn't mean that they actually have the capacity to provide you a guaranteed Gigabit pipe. They're overprovisioning their network and hoping that not enough people want to max their connection out at the same time.

In other words, a bill of goods.

So they are throttling because they can't fulfill the demand and want to save money on network traffic?

The EU asked them to. They were having no problem keeping up.

Why would anyone in Europe ask for that. All ISP publicity said they have more than enough capacity available.

Also it would be the first time that a U.S net company does something voluntarily just by kindly asking.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/19/tech/netflix-internet-ove...

"European Commissioner Thierry Breton, who is responsible for the EU internal market covering more than 450 million people, spoke to Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings on Wednesday and again on Thursday about the strain video streaming was placing on networks."

Apparently the EU thinks it's a problem.

The truth is that this will probably make little difference, but it makes sense for Netflix to do this since it doesn't cost them anything and now they are owed a favor by a regulator.

Let's first address the elephant in the room.

If it weren't for the ridiculous power of the copyright industry, there would be no problem.

Because non-live streaming doesn't make sense except as an artificial way to control copyright.

There literally is no other reason why you would download an entire movie and then throw it away.

Instead of this bullshit, people could easily have a small box of microSDs with their favourite films and series. You could exchange them with friends, it would be fun. Again, why did Netflix used to be mailing around DVDs instead of much more efficient read-only SDs? Oh yeah, copyright bullshit.

It's very easy to forget that everybody together made up this one completely artificial rule that, unlike normal data, this is "magical data" that we have to pretend cannot be copied or stored. What ever.

What an utter joke. This is only needed because unlike the backbone operators who are pushing ridiculous record traffic through the IXs these days and don't even hit any limit on their capability, the last-mile operators have not done any major investments in their infrastructure.

Cable TV internet is horribly oversold - Kabel Deutschland was already infamous, when they got bought up by Vodafone shit got even worse. DSL ... let's just say most of Germany is happy to have 16/1 ADSL. I have 100/10 FTTB via M-net and even they have load problems.

Cellphone internet is even worse but as data is horribly expensive in Germany no one dares streaming Netflix over that anyway...

tl;dr: it's not Netflix fault, it's last mile telcos who have done jack shit the last decade to build out new FTTP infra coupled with appropriate uplink capacity to the nearest IX, but people are too dumb to understand this and blame Netflix instead of directing their anger towards politicians and telcos where it belongs!

> Cellphone internet is even worse but as data is horribly expensive in Germany no one dares streaming Netflix over that anyway...

Luckily we have net-neutrality infringing features like Telekom's "Stream On" where it's included /s

It is kind of unrelated to this, but I am asking maybe somebody could help me. Do you guys know where can I read and learn more about the details of the Netflix network? I looked at their technical blog, but I wanted something more detailed and technical. Is there something like Netflix research papers (e.g. Google published Bigtable IIRC).

Its not a whitepaper, but look into OpenConnect, since i believe thats how they serve a majority of traffic

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

I don't quite understand the "how dare they!" attitude some of the comments here convey.

If you want to talk legality etc., most contracts have a "force majeur" clause that would cover this sort of thing. And even if it didn't, if enough businesses start having to modify or break service agreements in these ways through a world-wide crisis then governments will step in and legislate them out of liability. There won't be too much sympathy for the "victims" of Netflix either. Not from the general public, especially those who lose friends or family to the pandemic. Not over someone's pixelated experience of End Game or The Office. I know people who are sick, one closely, and I don't know if they're going to survive. Suffering through SD quality (or worse!) isn't what I concern myself with at the moment.

Yea. And what was the process here? One guy told another he's afraid. That's not how we in EU are used to governing. This is not a dictatorship.

There is absolutely no legal reason to downgrade performance of service. It's a big WTF.

What's next. A guy telling other to sell lesser quality of what?

Are they gonna cut my bill also? I would hate to pay for a service i a, not getting (4k streaming)

> Are they gonna cut my bill also? I would hate to pay for a service i a, not getting (4k streaming)

In a desperate time of need, 4k streaming isn't really all that important.

I imagine you can make that change to your account yourself. Whether Netflix will prorate this for everyone automatically remains to be seen.

You will still get 4k resolution. Just at 25% less bitrate. But since the thing that's necessary to fulfill your contract is the number of pixels, which have not changed, you are out of luck, unless you find some clause in your contract with Netflix that guarantees a certain bitrate.

Torrent as means of distribution would have been just perfect for the bandwidth.

I am really wondering whether this means they have to re-encode all the streams at 25% less bitrate, or whether they already have them available at that exact bitrate and can thus just change a default.

Because what I usually observe when Netflix compromises the streaming quality because of bandwidth problems with my connection is a far larger drop in quality than would be expected at just 25% less bits - it normally feels more like 75% less bitrate, if it doesn't switch down from HD to SD entirely.

I'm sure they already have the entire library at that bitrate as one of the standard bitrates.

In fact, you've probably gotten that bitrate in the past and just not noticed, because you have to be looking hard to see the quality difference.

I think they use DASH or HLS, which would generally mean they have everything pre-encoded.

It won't be just for 30 days. How can people complain about Netflix quality now? I will be grateful if we have anything still working in a few months...

Noone is complaining about quality, people are complaining about having to pay for quality they're not getting. Netflix can easily charge everyone the SD package price during this time.

Reminds me why I love my ISP. My residential fiber ISP in Rochester New York, Greenlight Networks, decided to give everyone symmetric upload connections for free upgrade in the name of Corona Virus (used to be 10:1 download:upload). So now I have a 1gbps symmetric for only $100/mo as their mid-tier option. They even have a 2gbps symmetric option also. That is how ISPs should be handling this.

I dont understand the issue here, as far as i am aware Netflix installs media boxes at the data-centers of every ISP. And a video demand from netflix device is directly resolved to these media boxes instead of resolving the content and downloading through Internet. So arent they already saving Internet bandwidth and rely on a Intranet like solution for distributing its contents?

Netflix is full of BS anyway. I have yet to see a single instance of 4K despite paying for it & having suitable gear and fiber line.

Go to http://fast.com and see what bandwidth you're getting.

There is a good chance your ISP is limiting your bandwidth to Netflix, preventing you from getting 4K.

If you get a good speed from that test, you should call Netflix customer service to help you diagnose.

970 mbps.

>good chance your ISP is limiting your bandwidth to Netflix

Possible, but unlikely. Forunate enough to be in a jurisdiction where broadband generally does what it says on the tin.

Also using the netflix win10 app and hdcp screen so that I can get all that juicy DRM.

>you should call Netflix customer service to help you diagnose.

Yeah probably a good idea

This is interesting, would YouTube cut the quality too? If no, does this mean Netflix has much higher traffic than YouTube?

Comcast has been doing some emergency maintenance and/or upgrades with 1-2 hour downtimes for the last week or two in San Francisco. Haven't noticed any slowdowns here though. I imagine they had a few upgrades ready to go and decided to pull the trigger on them/roll them out ahead of schedule.

With Netflix having content caches this seems like incompetency from the EU commissioner paired with an openness to virtue signaling in this time from Netflix. Isn’t it the job of the ISP to shape the traffic accordingly if they overprovisioned and are now failing their customers due to that?

If there ever was a quintessential example of a “first world problem”, this is it right here.

Lately i was looking for internet transfer data for last, say, 60 days per day to confirm / reject claim transfer is higher now in Europe. But couldnt find it. And broken Google results does not help much. Do you know of any of such resources?

Makes one wonder, why doesn't europe have a netflix of their own?

Considering europe has a GDP comparable to the US and a few hundred million more people, you'd think they'd have one or two or more netflixes of their own.

Time for the Negroponte Switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negroponte_switch

Swede here:

Ok, I'll unsubscribe from Netflix. I've been eying those HBO shows anyway.

Edit: 8-year running subscription now cancelled. I have no polite words for what I feel for this action by Netflix. Fxxk them.

Kind of off topic, but has anyone used Nvidia's Shield TV "AI Upscaling"? Super curious if it would make the viewing experience better for situations like this.

similar to the other discussion thread about this.... what is this based on? Who's pressuring who to get a meeting with Netflix to make this kind of request?

Well, I hope Netflix is going to cut prices just as well.

Had my first Netflix problem today at 5pm. Has always been solid before today. Other streaming services were good (though YouTube searching etc looked loaded)

The real news is that Europe's internet backbone cannot handle this stress test. Once this blows over that needs addressed.

And this is how I will switch to lower tier plan. As paying and not getting service seems to be unfair even with COVID-19 in sight

BBC: It is not clear if this applies to the special snow flakes on the island off of Europe.

Netflix: You're Europeans again, England. Suck it.

Scotland: Ha ha.

Actually, we've never NOT been Europeans, and we've never NOT been in Europe. Europe's just a continent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe).

However, we did recently leave the European Union. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union.) Completely different thing, but very commonly confused.

Kodi and mpv continue to work as normal...

My stash of BluRay rips are still working at full quality as well.

Jellyfin is really nice if you have a semi-powerful, wired-network machine to run it on. Former Kodi user, now a convert.

Kodi on an Rpi makes a good cast target for it, though.

I've gone for Infuse and Apple TV 4K, since I haven't been able to find anything as fast as the 4K Apple TV that's not an actual computer.

I am using Emby, since that seems to be the only one of those platforms that can handle IPTV

What is semipowerful, approximately?

The main thing is being able to handle transcoding for certain clients that need it. I’ve got it in Docker on an oldish workstation I bought for like $100 on eBay and threw an SSD in for the OS, but that thing’s surely serious overkill. If you’re only streaming to one or two clients at a time, being on a wired network and having hardware support for any codecs you’ll be dealing with are probably the most important factors.

Should we look forward to a 25% discount too? :-) Hopefully this is not going to be downgrading to SD.

Such a shame that multicast never took off.

Would save tremendous amounts of bandwidth in times like this.

This may work when a live stream is being watched at many locations from a single or few sources, but in the case of video on demand, the utility of multicast would be very limited – maybe some folks would coincidentally request the same packets at the same time, but the chance of that should be vanishingly low.

Best approach is just cancel Netflix (saying this was the reason) and go back to the torrents -- they will still have the best quality.

They are lowering quality (of service or the catalog size, not always video) and keeping or increasing the prices for a while. Using a global pandemic as an excuse is just a new low.

Hogging bandwidth is detrimental to everyone, especially emergency personnel. Please don't do this. The government wouldn't ask if there wasn't a need. The alternative is having everyone's internet cut outright.

I'm sorry - I'm sure you mean well, but this is downright false. This is not the US. In most European countries bandwidth is plentiful and this is completely unneeded political intervention based on not understanding technology. ISPs do actually upgrade their infrastructure without it being past collapse in Europe.

> The government wouldn't ask if there wasn't a need.

I wish I lived in this blissful world.

Is it just me or has Hulu been down entirely for the past couple of days?

And Disney+ hasn't even launched yet. March 24th will be interesting

I'm curios to what load the cellular networks are seeing

Are they going to deliver the lower quality videos with AV1?

2020, year of the VHS

We still subscribe to the Netflix DVD service. Now filling our queue.

such a luxury

It works.

Anyone know where that remote is from in the picture?

If we have Ultra HD plan, should we downgrade?

i severely lucked out being in a college town during all this, so many people just left the town, our networks are blazing :P

Everything in AtOmXpLuS.CoM

Crazy

man everyone here's an expert all of a sudden.

Netflix forced to give customers a lower quality product instead of ISPs forced to give customers the product they're paying for. Classic!

That's all that you need to know about the efficiency of remote work

This is totally offtopic but since bunch of people are talking about torrenting here I figured I'd ask - are you getting subtitles from somewhere?

I think my English is pretty good but still watching shows without subs feels like it takes more work and doesn't let me focus on the content.

I used to use opensubtitles.org but it's gotten from difficult to use to impossible to use due to all the popups and crap like that.

This sucks. If bandwidth were metered, the market would ration is appropriately. Generally speaking, anything "free" or "unlimited" gets misallocated. When you put a price on something, it gets better.

What’s the point of rationing something that costs a hundredth of a cent per GB?

You get 10TB of bandwidth for a dollar. Once average usage per subscriber goes over that, then we can talk.

I think the real problem is that the supply is too inelastic. The marginal cost of delivering more data is trivial, until part of your network gets congested, and then your short-term options are limited. This is the same problem that water utilities often face: it's cheap, until you run out.

Assigning a single rate ($/TB) requires you to make some assumptions that are at risk of being violated in exceptional circumstances. Using variable pricing to charge more during peak hours is too complicated for consumers to keep track of and their options for changing behavior are limited, so this earns the ISP more money but doesn't eliminate congestion during peak hours.

> Using variable pricing to charge more during peak hours is too complicated for consumers to keep track of

Why? It works for electricity.

Peak vs off-peak prices for electricity aren't that far apart—up to a factor of 3 in my area for residential service. And that's for a fixed schedule of peak/shoulder/off-peak hours. More dynamic demand-based pricing of electricity doesn't work all that well for residential service; it basically requires automated load-shifting that's far more practical for industrial customers than residential.

The cost curve for internet service during peak hours is a lot steeper. I think it would take much more than a 3x price multiplier during peak hours to get any noticeable demand reduction beyond what streaming applications already do by dropping down to lower resolutions automatically. (Assuming that the base cost for off-peak usage is remotely realistic, ie. orders of magnitude lower than the metered prices we pay for cellular data in the US.)

Makes you think, how much further we could stretch things if we were all using the Nims/C/C++ of the world instead of the Ruby's.

Please don't immediately flame, I'm just saying objectively, we could stretch hardware out much further. What do you guys think about this?

This about network bandwidth capacity, not server hardware load. Netflix is going to send the same bytes over the network regardless of what language it's using for the server code.

Sounds like an ISP bandwidth issue, the bottleneck is the network not the cpu.

It's always been a trade-off of engineering time to improve performance vs shipping new features.

That said, I have been enjoying maxing out my Raspberry Pi to see what I can get it to do. (File server, PiHole so far, transcoding audio files so far...)

Looking forward to writing some node.js servers for it to see what it can support.

I strongly subscribe to this view. Opinions like this get dismissed by the usual premature optimisation argument and that engineer-time is expensive, but I think that if we built our stacks with performance and efficiency in mind a significant chunk of operating and indeed development costs would be eliminated from corporate expenditures and would outweigh the potential initial development costs (which I don't think is that much of an issue, especially when you have competent and skilled engineers building said software).

Networking stacks tend to be fairly optimized already.

I don't think C++ generates more efficient packets than Ruby.....

In fact they are more efficient, but not as elegant.

I have to imagine that this is to mitigate problems with bandwidth intensive low level networking equipment that is performance sensitive, not application level code. That equipment typically runs code in the languages you mentioned.

I mean, there is always the productivity trade off. If hardware/bandwidth is cheaper than dev time... I guess that was the idea with Go, to be productive to write and more efficient to run than the dynamic languages.

I think incentives in commercial software are out of whack. It's often more profitable to make garbage software that is barely fit for purpose. But that same critique also applies to much of our economic system.

If we want a particular outcome, the incentives need to be aligned accordingly.

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