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Comment by ninjinxo | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, Australia had problems when Netflix was first becoming popular here, putting huge strains on the network and causing widespread congestion issues from 6 to 10 pm.

I wonder if we'll ever see a predictive home-caching system; if I watch the first three episodes of squid game in one night, it might be sensible to have my TV download the rest of the series overnight.

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having multicast working on the internet would make this extremly efficient for the distributors (i.e. netflix) but the last mile (i.e. your ISP) still would have to deliver the packets to their customers one by one. at Netflix scale it would probably be already very beneficial to do that by broadcasting the stream starting every 5 seconds or something for uncached viewing. (i.e make the player wait for the next broadcast and jump to different ones [or start a new one at desired offset if none exist] when seeking).

Instead of using the internet its also feasible to use the DVB network like this. they could even broadcast a copy long before release so its guaranteed to be ready for offline watching when released. i am almost certain Sky Germany does something similar...

a long, long time ago, we used devices called "vcr" to record specific streams that were broadcast over the cable network to have them ready for offline watching.

yes its basically the same thing with DRM on-top.

A hybrid approach would be the best. You could start with an unicast stream and prefetch the rest of the show in the background by subscribing to a few cycling multicast streams. That requires a few gigabytes of temporary storage of course.

At least the Android app does have the ability to do downloads, and I thought it had the ability to schedule downloads for off hours, but I don't have it in front of me so I might be misremembering

Doesn't Netflix have a CDN in Australia, and doesn't Australia have fast Internet within the continent? I'm a bit surprised this is such a problem

We do now. The problem was when Netflix first opened here and the vast majority of people were still on ADSL links or even slower, and our NBN infrastructure was still just starting to come together (which I'm not going to go into details about because omg there's a huge political fight in that which I really don't want to think about)

Short version: our Netflix is just fine now. There were just a couple rocky weeks/months at the start. :)

Doesn't the Netflix app already do that? Or was that the Prime Video one?

And then you'd have storage issues instead of bandwidth!

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