Hacker News Reader

Comment by ranci | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree. I have wondered what exactly engineers at... Netflix, for example, do on a day to day basis. The product plays videos, right? Its played videos for...years. Their newer features are pretty clear overengineering efforts like "Smart downloads". Because they've run out of shit to do so badly that the app will literally just start downloading things on your behalf without you. Why is this at all necessary? What users asked for this? Its exactly the kind of thing someone who had nothing else to do would come up with.

View on HN

Maintaining infinite platform/device compatibility, optimising video delivery, reducing bandwidth costs and new features to push the medium forward (like the choose-your-own-adventure thing they made).

Video delivery is hard. If you spend a month working on a basic Netflix clone showing a single clip it won't be 1/100th the performance of Netflix even if you use a CDN.

Netflix has optimizations for individual ISPs by placing content servers directly in their DCs.

Also, large organizations accumulate constant tech debt that need to be paid down. Features aren't infinitely scalable.

The fact that they have people optimizing that obsessively is an indication of how little real work there is to be done. The thing plays videos, its played videos for years upon years, and all that's left in engineering terms seems to be to make it faster to a small degree that no user is likely to even detect.

It's not just playing video. Actually playing the video is easy. Delivering it to the end user is enormously challenging.

Even with a top-shelf CDN, you will have a non-negligible amount of customers having playback issues because of routing issues, peering disputes, congestion etc.

If delivery was easy, Akamai would not be a multi-billion dollar company. Microsoft wouldn't pay them millions, they'd just spin up some content servers themselves.

Saving X kb per 30 minutes of video streamed is "obsessively" optimizing something if you're serving a single video. If you're over 10% of all of Internet traffic, that can be millions of dollars saved a year, which pays for more than a few engineers even at SV salaries.

Couldn’t you argue that their obsessive optimization is one of the things that led them to dominate in the streaming space?

As a user I certainly appreciate it, but I think the actual content being delivered plays a much larger role than how many milliseconds its delivered in.

I have the opposite take; I think it shows how well they do their jobs. It reminds of the Steve Jobs quote, "Simple can be harder than complex"

Compare it to Disney+ or HBO Go and you’ll learn why the comparison isn’t that simple. Netflix starts faster and doesn’t pause under a much broader set of network conditions because there’s a team of people improving it. Those other products support fewer devices and it still shows how much room there is to mature beyond the basic level of service you get with redundant servers and a CDN.

Wow. No offense but this is a shockingly naive take

Reply on news.ycombinator.com