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Comment by geor9e | Hacker News Reader

They've been doing live events since 2023. But it's hard to be prepared for something that's never been done by anyone before — a superbowl scale event, entirely viewed over the internet. The superbowl gets to offload to cable and over the air. Interestingly, I didn't have any problems with my stream. So it sounds like the bandwidth problems might be localized, perhaps by data center or ISP.

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Maybe they considered this event as a rehearsal for the upcoming NFL streams which I am guessing might have a wider audience

Yes I agree that fight had a great deal of interest but the nfl is their real goal.

I suspect a lot of it could be related to ISP bandwidth. I streamed it on my phone without issue. Another friend put their TV on their phone’s WiFi which also worked. Could be partly that phone hotspots lower video bandwidth by default.

I suspect it’s a bit of both Netflix issues and ISPs over subscribing bandwidth.

I would guess the majority of the streamed bandwidth was sourced from boxes like these in ISP's points of presences around the globe: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

So I agree the problems could have been localized to unique (region, ISP) combinations.

My suspicion is the same as yours, that this may have been caused by local ISPs being overwhelmed, but it could be a million other things too. I had network issues. I live in a heavily populated suburban area. I have family who live 1000+ miles away in a slightly less populated suburban area, they had no issues at all.

The ISP hypothesis doesn't make sense to me. I could not stream the live event from Netflix. But I could watch any other show on netflix or youtube or hulu at the same time.

Some ISPs have on-site Netflix Open Connect racks. The advantage of this is that they get a high-priority quality of service data stream into the rack, which then serves the cached content to the ISP customers. If your ISP doesn't have a big enough Netflix rack and it gets saturated, then you're getting your streams at the whim of congestion on the open internet. A live stream is a few seconds of video downloaded, and it has to make it over the congestion of the internet in a few seconds and then repeat. If a single one of these repeats hits congestion and gets delayed, you see the buffering spinning wheel. Other shows, on the other hand, can show the cached Netflix splash animation for 10 seconds while they request 20 minutes of cache until they get it. So, dropped packets don't matter much. Even if the internet is seeing congestion every couple of minutes, delaying your packets, it won't matter as non-live content is very flexible and patient about when it receives the next 20-minute chunk. I'm not an ISP or Netflix engineer, so don't take these as exact numbers. I'm just explaining how the "bandwidth problems might be localized" hypothesis can make sense from my general understanding.

Yeah, I think people are incorrectly assuming that everyone had the same experience with the stream. I watched the whole thing and only had a few instances of buffering and quality degradation. Not more than 30 seconds total during the stream.

Even if it was only 30% of people had a problem that's still millions of unhappy users. Not great for a time sensitive event.

Also, from lurking in various threads on the topic Netflix's in app messages added to people's irritation by suggesting that they check their WiFi/internet was working. Presumably that's the default error message but perhaps that could have been adjusted in advance somehow.

One of the times I reloaded the page I got a raw envoy error message!

The point is that if the problem was different depending on the user, it will be in a distribution layer, not in the encoding or production layer

That eliminates a whole raft of problems.

I had issues here and there but there was workarounds. Then, towards the end, the quality either auto negotiated or was forced down to accommodate the massive pull.

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