Cloud Efficiency at Netflix | Hacker News Reader

Cloud Efficiency at Netflix

netflixtechblog.com

46 pointsbenocodes52 comments

Maybe not directly related, but I dislike how Netflix obviously provides only 1080p HD on desktop-computer playback, while full 4k on TVs.

Has anyone found an easy hack to ensure playback happens in 4k on desktop as well (e.g. url parameter)?

From what I understand, they use DRM to support this segmentation. Applicable both to the state of affairs and the hack

Netflix's over-segmentation is the reason I ultimately stopped subscribing. You have to pay substantially more to get any of many screens, no ads, or 4K. As a single user who wants 4K, I then feel like I'm paying for something I don't need when the plan has many screens. None of the other big players like Amazon, YouTube, or Apple do this, all provide 4K to all subscribers and as far as I know only really segment by number of users, if they segment at all.

Amazon and Apple do not supply full HD or 4K to PCs at all.

YouTube do not even supply anything more than SD to PCs for rented or purchased titles.

Amazon lock Dolby Vision behind their ad free supplement. YouTube locks high bittrate 1080p behind YouTube Premium. Paramount lock 4K behind their upper tier. So do Disney.

You are, bluntly, flat wrong here.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I don't use any of these services on PC, I'm just thinking of regular TV viewing. Apple, Amazon, and YouTube all provide 4K at all paying price points.

> YouTube locks high bittrate 1080p behind YouTube Premium

I'm discounting free tiers. I think it's fine to segment aggressively to get people into paying tiers, but nickle and diming paying users just sucks.

> Paramount lock 4K behind their upper tier. So do Disney.

I've never had either of these, but would be less likely to as a result.

I know 4K streaming is substantially more expensive than 1080p, but honestly the delivery is such a small fraction of the price being paid that it does not need to be associated with an increased cost.

Amazon also doesn’t do HDR on PCs any more.

I suspect almost everyone shares a netflix account with thier household and statistically there's few single person households. So this is life, everything is setup for the average even things like bin collections will assume multiple people in your house.

I shared Netflix with my family (parents, sister, brother) for 2 years and think I ran into the 2 screen limit twice. 4 screens seems just entirely unnecessary to me.

That said, if Netflix decided 4K was the segmentation for the higher plan and gave 4 screens to the lower plan, that wouldn't suit me personally, but I would prefer the pricing. Honestly the screens concept seems outdated with their anti-password sharing stuff now. Just apply the same WiFi pinning to all viewing and don't limit screens at all.

The more typical use case involves background TV running in multiple rooms. Much of what Netflix licenses and produces is made for this.

Recently: "Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529756

It's easy to blow past four with a screen, not necessarily a TV, going in every room.

Are there that many people with deep-fried brains like that?

It was a staple of the 90s/20s.

Some people just do better with ignorable vibrations in their spaces.

Even if we take a family of 4 as an example, who are at most 1/3rd of Netflix's user base according to another commenter, that means having 4 TVs/PCs, all on at the same time, and all with Netflix playing. That seems like a real edge case at the fringes to me, not least because it would necessitate no one in the family being together.

Almost 30% of households are singles and another third are households of two.

And netflix have two plans with only 1 screen.

They provide 4K playback via Microsoft Edge to PCs that have a HEVC codec pack installed, where all the connected monitors support HDCP 2.2 over that connection port and if the GPU supports Play ready SL3000.

But those are enforced via hardware backed keys.

Or you can download a torrent and 4k just works always.

Perfect time for Demonoid to return

Multi-tracker search has become much more viable today with tools like Servarr/Prowlarr out there, so you there's less of an incentive for a "one to beat them all" style tracker.

Hehe, my ploy to get best info on how to do this worked.

Bonus: never mind Demonoid, this also means Usenet is back!

Time is a flat circle. I'm not mad because I get to enjoy things I missed this time around.

>Has anyone found an easy hack to ensure playback happens in 4k on desktop as well (e.g. url parameter)?

Yes there is. It's called piracy.

Well, users paying for Netflix, are not supposed to be subject to unasked quality downsampling just because you watch from a non-TV device. This sort of optimization might be fine with small laptop screens, but not 5k Computer screens, and I don't know if Netflix does it on purpose or just put `if not TV => send lowerRes` in their code (simplified of course).

The answer is piracy. There are no content providers that are confident enough in their DRM to send 4k streams to devices that are in control of their owners instead of cooperations. PCs are the scariest thing ever and they will do everything in their power to kill them.

Pirate content and be free

Or buy an apple tv and hook it up to your monitor.

Pirate sites obtain the high quality material as soon as it's launched anyway, so this kind of "protection" just adds friction for the paying user.

These restrictions are never there to prevent piracy. It’s there for corporates to be able to say that “we did everything”. They are there for legal reasons. That’s true for every single security features. It’s a side effect if some security feature is really effective. Most of them are just annoyance, they don’t prevent anything.

There are enough games out there to simply show this isn't true.

What do you mean?

Which is just crazy, considering lots of the $15 HDMI switchers on Amazon actually strip HDCP, and you can then use a capture card to record whatever you want from a 4k supporting device. I guess they're just preventing the easiest methods.

The best kind of restriction: annoys everyone (because they need to claim they tried to prevent piracy) except those who are serious about circumventing the restriction

Even worse is Amazon Prime, which doesn't even provide 1080 on Linux systems, even with Widevine.

When I tried to watch some of their original shows I got blurry mess that looked about 360p. It was unwatchable. Tried to mess with widevine to no avail, so I'm no longer their customer. There's enough shows to watch elsewhere these days.

Yes it's the only way to watch documentaries at 2x speed but the quality becomes crap

Nope. Build a ship and sail onto the thunderous oceans with the pirates!

The resolution mostly isn't the issue, the extreme compression and the resulting artifacts are what ruin the experience for me.

Take any movie with dark scenes, and it'll look horrible regardless of 720p vs 4k.

What happened to netflix? their quality (streaming) is so poor. Out of all the video streaming sources I use (including random shady sites, youtube,vimeo, amazon prime,etc...) theirs has the worst experience. Despite paying for the costliest plan, if their webapp detects any dropped frames or performance issues, it keeps downgrading the video quality until I can't even make out what I'm looking at. Why not buffer or do whatever amazon is doing? I have to actually turn off hardware graphics acceleration in Chrome to stream at all. They used to be the leader in this space, I can't imagine any excuse at all, because their direct competitors are doing much better than them in terms of pure engineering quality. I assure you, I lack nothing in terms of hardware specs or internet speed either, I'm also a US customer.

Sorry for dropping in my personal rant, but it sort of triggered me after looking at the quality of this post. I'm thinking, perhaps they have a culture problem where the focus is "efficiency" as the title implies instead of quality.

Every year this kind of thing comes up about Netflix, I like to remind the Silicon Valley crowd that for all their billions invested, despite their thousands of highly compensated "engineers" and "data scientists" or whatever they're calling themselves now... NetFlix still hasn't figured out how to deliver subtitles in more than five languages to any particular region of the world.

They provide a service which at its core is just: audio, video, and text. They fail at one of three.

This apparently doesn't warrant a blog, or any attention at all for a decade now.

It's their core service!

Meh... not exciting enough. Rearranging stuff in their cloud however got someone promoted.

Did they make one of these tech blogs about how they couldn’t even handle broadcasting a boxing match?

you're being downvoted for some reason (the sarcasm I guess), but Netflix did have technical issues with that boxing event between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5198106/is-video-stream...

> One crucial way in which we do this is through the democratization of highly curated data sources that sunshine usage and cost patterns across Netflix’s services and teams.

No engineer has ever said this. I miss when engineering blogs were actual engineering. This blog post has been through so much management waffle rewording it no longer adds much to the conversation.

"sunshine" - in corporate speak, no noun is too proper to verbify.

Oh Kingdom of Nouns, whomst we've foolishly renounced, how longingly we now yearn for thee!

I was excited when I read the title but after reading I am at a loss to understand how Netflix is solving the problem. Centralised cost dashboards??!?

How do they solve it on AWS? Tags, Accounts, something else? Why can't they use cost explorer?

Once you hit a certain scale anything on the AWS console becomes impossible to use. It’s one of the reasons most high to very high scale companies use something else to manage cloud resources. See: Spinnaker and Asgard for Netflix specific examples, but also Terraform and the many alternatives.

I work for an organisation that is at this scale on AWS. Of course, we use Terraform, but the cost explorer and tags and so on are still usable (and useful).

That’s fair, I should have caveated this statement with the fact that I don’t know much about using the modern AWS console.

There are likely a few factors at play here, including the fact that Netflix decided to go its own way in this regard ~15y ago.

Though I work at a smaller (but still large), newer company now we still also have our own stuff for this.

I can back up your anecdote.

For <business reasons> we have in the order of 10^6 SNS topics in one account+region pair. In that account, while in that region, the SNS console is entirely frozen. I suspect they're doing some looped pagination polling in the background and fall over on our degenerate use case.

Edit: I can also back up the other parent comment - tagging still works fine (and I know for a fact the stability and scalability of the tag system is taken more seriously than most things within AWS)

“sunshine” along with the “rising sun” diagram make me wonder if this entire blog is some engineer’s subtle attempt at satire

Does it perhaps mean in business speak: "We're now in the third phase of growth, we needed to make the engineers spend less on servers"?

There is no real value in this blog post. Nothing but a boilerplate post, with no actual technicalities

There are a couple points that resonate with me. I strongly believe there is a need to provide transparency and accountability to cloud engineers. How many cloud enginners know the exact list of resources they own in all accounts and regions they have access to? How much money do cloud provider make out abandonned, zombie, long-forgotten resources?

What they built sound nice and feature-rich but also quite complex. I just finished adding a (simplier) feature to the SaaS I am building. It generates individual reports with the list of resources owned by the user, the associated cost and flag for thise which are likely unused.

I will post of Show HN soon, but if you are interested in cloud efficiency, I would love you feedback! https://li10.com

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