Netflix's Ken Florance: The Man Who Keeps the Video Streaming | Hacker News Reader

Netflix's Ken Florance: The Man Who Keeps the Video Streaming

mobile.businessweek.com

25 pointsyarapavan19 comments

Here's the non mobile link: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-24/netflixs-con...

The author of the article is following the lazy and tired "Point at that hippie and laugh" formula, complete with a "Right on, man" ending. Maybe that's expected for a mainstream publication like Businessweek?

Other than that, the article is interesting.

It's the norm when writing about someone in a group that is socially acceptable to openly deride.

The only bit unique to Businessweek is that their editorial voice serves a market that accepts this flavor of derision. The difference between your standards and theirs is the only reason this stood out at all.

Didn't you get the New Media Strategy Memo? You kick up controversy and write as aggressively / polarized as possible and you gain page-views (i.e. money) as people on both sides come to read the article before running off to social media sites to argue endlessly about it.

Is an improvement from people having these disparate opinions and not discussing them at all I hope.

talk netflix gave at NYCBSDCon NYCBSDCon 2014: Serving one-third of the Internet via FreeBSD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL5U4wr86L4

I think the FCC should get involved and ask the simple question of why can't ISP's use Netflix open connect .. as it seems that would fix a ton of problems the ISP are having with netflix incoming traffic.

It doesn't really solve the fundamental issue: Because of the volume of traffic Netflix generates, ISPs are highly sensitive to the size of Netflix's audience and the bitrates Netflix chooses to stream. Both of those have the potential to grow faster than their capability (or desire) to expand the capacity of their networks.

If that was the fundamental issue, ISPs would be talking about provider-agnostic throttling of usage to protect network stability and performance during periods of high utilization.

Which is something they already do.

What they're actually talking about, Re: Net Neutrality, is throttling a particular provider, regardless of the usage level of the network or the total traffic being streamed by that provider.

... on the other hand, the ISPs wouldn't be complaining about their own video-streaming offerings expanding exponentially. The conflict-of-interest in this whole back-and-forth between Netflix and large ISPs is so palpable that you can almost taste it (very bitter :P).

The difference is that lots of ISPs have invested in IPTV networks, and those are designed not to eat your bandwidth and clog the network.

Netflix has offered to setup devices within the ISP network that will cache the videos so that the ISP's users will stream from the cache rather than directly from Netflix. The ISPs have refused (presumably because it competes with their own offerings).

Everyone pretty much agrees that traffic over the ISP's internal networks aren't really an issue; the big issue is the traffic over the network connection points. There are solutions to alleviate this, but the ISPs aren't really interested in these solutions. They feel that their monopoly position gives them the power to dictate terms to everyone else, effectively holding their (paying) customers hostage for ransom.

Everyone pretty much agrees that traffic over the ISP's internal networks aren't really an issue

Everyone agrees with this? How did we get to that conclusion? Netflix is 1/3 of primetime internet traffic. If they double their average bitrate * average viewing audience in, say, two years, that won't be a problem for ISPs' internal networks? They're that over-provisioned?

Obviously, you can't say something that broad for all ISPs in all locations. But in a recent dispute Verizon posted a graphic[1] showing that the max average peak utilization in their network was 65% of capacity. So if Netflix is 1/3 of that (say 22% capacity) and it doubles their average bitrate to all customers, it would still not saturate the link.

[1] http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/verizo...

VOD probably uses just as much bandwidth per stream as Netflix and trying to compete with Netflix using linear IPTV is like trying to turn back time.

The VOD traffic runs on a different VLAN tho. It has it's own network.

Building out a separate network for IPTV is pretty wasteful, and then not letting customers use it how they see fit is just asking for these kinds of problems.

HTTP? What does it mean? all HTTP requests except for the following domain?

I wondering the same thing myself. I did a bit of searching and found this: http://allthingsd.com/20130514/netflix-still-eats-a-third-of...

According to that article it does mean all HTTP traffic other than the specific sources listed in the chart.

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