[HN Gopher] Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
___________________________________________________________________
Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
Author : tompagenet2
Score : 392 points
Date : 2020-03-19 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| agumonkey wrote:
| 2020, year of the VHS
| Finnucane wrote:
| We still subscribe to the Netflix DVD service. Now filling our
| queue.
| agumonkey wrote:
| such a luxury
| Finnucane wrote:
| It works.
| [deleted]
| myu701 wrote:
| Does anyone know of public ISP dashboards that show used/total
| capacity on their network in terms of customer usage?
|
| I'm sure its trivial for an internal employee to pull up
| solarwinds or whatever, but I'd be curious to see if these ISPs
| are merely running above normal, running hot, barely hanging on
| with intermittent "isp brownouts" etc.
|
| This is probably a pipe dream but not gonna get any questions
| answered if I don't ask.
| wmf wrote:
| ISPs don't publish that information but some IXPs do. They are
| not running at saturation.
| qayxc wrote:
| The largest backbone in the world publishes statistics:
|
| https://www.de-cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statis...
| tomaszs wrote:
| Thanks. I dont see there any anomaly. Just one higher spike
| and than normal transfer. So... There is no increase?
| bluegreyred wrote:
| The CTO of de-cix recently gave an interview regarding the
| current situation. They monitored the situation in Italy, put
| some upgrades in place earlier than originally planned and
| are not worried about a 40% increase within the next four
| weeks.
|
| https://www.golem.de/news/internet-traffic-de-cix-sieht-
| kein...
| dylz wrote:
| For clarification, this is not a "backbone" - it is an
| exchange fabric.
| qayxc wrote:
| Thanks for clearing that up!
| aeyes wrote:
| And for further clarification, you won't see much Netflix
| traffic there because the big ISPs have Netflix caches
| within their infrastructure.
| dylz wrote:
| Yeah, you will not see the additional hundreds of Gbps of
| "internal" Netflix traffic, but you may very well see
| smaller increases as small ISPs that aren't approved for
| "full rack Netflix appliances" pick up Netflix traffic
| over the routeservers.
| hobofan wrote:
| The big German ISPs don't have Netflix caches within
| their infrastructure, which might be part of the problem
| here. Last mile infrastructure might be even worse
| though.
| dylz wrote:
| Germany is rather odd compared to the other countries
| with its adoption of broadband tech - for example you see
| a decent bit of FTTH/FTTx in NL, NO/DK/SE (muni owned,
| early adopters), etc.
|
| Then you go to Germany and it's mass of DSL (and some
| areas cable). I wonder what happened or why?
| blargh wrote:
| in 1981 the (west) german government passed a law that
| over the next 30 years a nationwide fiber net should be
| established. sadly, in 1982 when helmut kohl (a
| conservative) became cancelor these plans were scrapped.
| instead we got cable tv. one reason was cost of course -
| cable was 60% cheaper than fiber. another much darker
| reason was: the public tv back then was, from a
| conservative standpoint, very leftish (e.g. shows like
| "monitor" or "panorama"). the conservative leaders
| couldn't control public tv, but they could open the gates
| for a nationwide private tv sector. and they did.
| hobofan wrote:
| Not an expert on the topic, but IIRC this is the rough
| outline:
|
| - The main ISP of Germany is Deutsche Telekom, a formerly
| state-owned company that was privatized ~25 years ago,
| which Germany still holds stock in
|
| - In the past Telekom was awarded big contracts to expand
| broadband access across the country
|
| - Telekom is/was really slow at fulfilling those
| contracts, and at the same time behaves in an anti-
| competitive manner towards any independent ISPs that try
| to fill the void
|
| - The government doesn't punish any of that behaviour
| like they rarely do with a big German company, even more
| so with privatized ones that they have a stake in
|
| To also be fair towards Telekom a bit, Germany is a very
| decentralized country, which is a boon in a lot of
| situations, but also challenging for any infrastructure
| projects. Part of the contracts was that they also have
| to expand broadband access in all rural parts of Germany.
| fragmede wrote:
| I'm not sure that's (entirely) it. I don't know if this
| is why Netflix doesn't do it, but Germany doesn't have
| the same First Amendment laws as the US. In particular,
| there are some writings that are illegal under German
| law. Thus, locating a box in Germany that could
| potentially hold material that is illegal under German
| law is ill advised. That the box is operating simply as a
| local cache doesn't seem to change the lawyer's
| perspective.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#Re-
| unifi...
| cornedor wrote:
| Here are the AMS-IX stats: https://www.ams-
| ix.net/ams/documentation/total-stats
| scrdhrt wrote:
| Netnod, one of the largest IX in the nordics, has public stats
| here: https://www.netnod.se/ix-stats/All.html
|
| Don't know about any ISPs that do this.
| tyfon wrote:
| Here is for intra isp connections in Norway [1], but it does
| not really show "netflix" usage as most isps deliver the videos
| from a local server.
|
| [1] https://www.nix.no/statistics/
| whalesalad wrote:
| I would love to see this too. Anecdotally I have certainly been
| noticing a difference in the general behavior of the internet
| recently that I can only attribute to the sudden stress on the
| network.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| Are there any illustrations of the volumes of traffic that are
| being sent through core networks for netflix? I was under the
| impression the vast majority of traffic was served at the edge.
| bluegreyred wrote:
| That's exactly what I was wondering!
|
| With my (relatively small) Cable ISP in an affected country it
| obvious to me that any Netflix content gets served from very
| close to the edge, with higher bandwidth and lower latency than
| almost any other content from the internet.
|
| The last mile does not appear to be close to oversubscribed
| either, as indicated by my firewall which tracks RTT to the
| first hop (which is interestingly trending down compared to the
| past weeks) and the occasional speedtest that never drops below
| nominal bandwidth (200 Mbit).
|
| If anything it is low latency livestreaming content (i.e.
| Youtube, Twitch, Mixer) that should be throttled, particularly
| over cellular networks. I assume it's a matter of scale.
| jtchang wrote:
| What firewall do you use that has that?
| op00to wrote:
| There aren't, because this isn't a problem with Netflix. It's a
| problem with cheap ISPs that have gotten away with overselling
| service because most of their customers didn't actually use it.
| tyingq wrote:
| I think that's what they are relieving...edge traffic volumes.
| If the local ISP cache box lowers it's maximum quality, the
| ISPs get relief.
|
| The ISPs oversubscribed, and can't deal with this many people
| being at home all at once.
| jasoncartwright wrote:
| Citation needed. In the UK...
|
| "UK broadband companies say they can cope with increased
| demand as many more people stay at home during the
| coronavirus crisis."
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51870732
| ehsankia wrote:
| The very first line of the article
|
| > Netflix will reduce the video quality on its service in
| Europe for the next 30 days, to reduce the strain on
| _internet service providers_.
|
| emphasis mine.
| lwb wrote:
| A broadband company as referred to in the parent comment
| is an internet service provider.
| ehsankia wrote:
| 1. This is EU-wide, just because one or two broadband
| companies in a specific country said so doesn't mean they
| all can handle it.
|
| 2. I have doubt that any broadband company would openly
| admit to not being able to handle the extra load.
| MiroF wrote:
| > 2. I have doubt that any broadband company would openly
| admit to not being able to handle the extra load.
|
| Thank you! Found this entire thread very odd.
| oblio wrote:
| That's what they say now. Give them a few weeks and they'll
| start squealing. Every ISP oversubscribes for consumer
| segments. In the UK I guess not enough people are
| quarantined.
| rossmohax wrote:
| Some ISPs like Andrew & Arnolds don't oversubscribe, but
| they dont have unlimited plans either
| philjohn wrote:
| That has changed _somewhat_ of late. With WBC there 's no
| more "fixed" contention ratios and you pay for the last
| mile and then peer at national aggregation pops.
|
| It's a far cry from the 50:1 IPStream product.
| toyg wrote:
| _> In the UK I guess not enough people are quarantined._
|
| A bit of that, and also probably a bit that their network
| needs and expectations, even when self-isolating, are
| lower than in the suburbs of tech-intensive Seattle.
| op00to wrote:
| Just note, in your service contract the measure of whether
| service is working or not will likely be limited to being
| able to reach your ISPs website. As long as you can do
| that, it's just the vagaries of the internet, other
| providers you know.
| megablast wrote:
| Wow, they SAY they can keep up, that proves nothing.
| h0h0h0h0111 wrote:
| Log onto the internet at 1900hrs in central London on any
| normal day and be in for a shock
| MiroF wrote:
| Well if the companies say so
| jablala wrote:
| I think that's a porkie, I am with Vodafone (Openreach) and
| it's completely crippled.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| This question turned up a few hours ago over here [0].
| Apparently some ISPs are perversely hostile to peering.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22627764
| sneak wrote:
| They are incentivized to attempt to charge for paid peering.
| It's not that perverse, unless you like the internet going
| fast more than you like money.
| magila wrote:
| It's perverse because it's harmful to both Netflix and the
| ISP's customers. The only reason ISPs get away with it is
| because they hold a monopoly on their user's internet
| access. If ISPs were subject to competition it would be a
| no brainer to host a Netflix cache within their network.
| nine_k wrote:
| Normally when both sides are truly peers, they have
| valuable traffic to offer to each other, so their mutual
| payments would mostly cancel out.
|
| Likely some ISPs see themselves as offering more valuable
| traffic than their competitors striving to peer.
| el_duderino wrote:
| Not Netflix specific but Cloudflare posted some interesting
| stats a couple days ago: https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-
| shoulders-of-giants-recen...
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Does it mean they'll pay me back for the 4K package?
| lm28469 wrote:
| What if it's still 4k with reduced bit rate ? It's not like
| netflix 4k looks good anyway, chances are you won't tell the
| difference
| monkpit wrote:
| > It's not like netflix 4k looks good anyway
|
| I can definitely see a difference between 1080 and 4K on
| Netflix. Compared on the same internet connection and
| streaming device in the same house. One 1080 tv and one 4K
| tv.
| lm28469 wrote:
| That's not what I'm saying. Try to watch a 1080p bluray,
| even on a 4k tv it looks (much) better than netflix 4k.
| selectodude wrote:
| 100mbit/s h.265 is going to look better than most
| anything.
| monkpit wrote:
| I would not compare those two because I don't even have
| any type of disk player in my house. My only comparison
| is Netflix vs Netflix.
|
| My point is, you're saying nobody would notice the
| quality difference if Netflix lowered their quality. I
| think I would notice a bit.
| [deleted]
| rosybox wrote:
| You know, right now is not a time to be thinking about your
| ability to get the luxury service and goods you're used to.
| It's about us all staying alive and keeping each other alive
| and making it through this. Maybe you have to do with a little
| bit less than you're used to, maybe you don't think it's fair
| because you've paid $5 extra for your extra stream quality.
| None of us think what's happening is fair, but we have to
| accept it for what it is. Today isn't yesterday. Get your head
| straight.
| zuppy wrote:
| yes it is. i pay for 4k and my country has no problem with
| internet speed (we do have Gbps connections at home). this is
| not something we need.
| deft wrote:
| Can I use this argument to the people/corporations I owe? "Oh
| just get over it and accept things, it's not yesterday
| anymore you can't just expect delivery on contracts!"
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| That's exactly what a force majeure is. It depends on the
| specific contract and the jurisdiction whether a pandemic
| counts as one but it very well could.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Agreeing: If a pandemic isn't a _force majeure_ then wtf
| is?
|
| Perhaps if you signed up last week, then you could argue
| they should have foreseen the current situation from
| then. Prior to that, then it seems "best effort" is all
| one could or should expect. Perhaps with a monetary
| credit/refund if the mitigation is less costly than
| normal service.
| goldenchrome wrote:
| Please don't be unnecessarily condescending on this forum.
| They're asking a simple question.
| massysett wrote:
| I think GP is probably being sarcastic...
| jamiequint wrote:
| oh for fucks sake, go away.
| [deleted]
| wishinghand wrote:
| It's not like the employees of Netflix are the downtrodden
| proletariat. This company that spends billions on content can
| afford a few refunds.
|
| Now if this was a similar comment directed at a co-op that
| had fallen on hard times, then your comment would be more
| appropriate.
| crazygringo wrote:
| First of all, that kind of tone is not appreciated here.
|
| But beyond your tone, why do you think right now "staying
| alive" means that a _business_ should be collecting an extra
| $5 per person, instead of it staying with _people?_
|
| Considering the difficulties many people are going to have
| making rent etc... it seems like the default sympathetic
| position here should lie with the _customer_ , not the
| business. To me, that's "getting your head straight." Siding
| with the common person over a corporation.
|
| It baffles me how anyone could defend the current situation
| as an opportunity for more profits that customers should just
| shut up about.
| frostburg wrote:
| This is a new and surprising way to argue for corporations
| against people using a pressing external issue.
| op00to wrote:
| This is a fake problem, as evidenced by many network
| operators commenting on Twitter that traffic is only slightly
| higher. If people are having problems, it's because their ISP
| has oversubscribed the last mile and are defrauding
| customers.
| martin8412 wrote:
| But this is a completely unnecessary measure. Most ISPs in
| the EU don't have any problems keeping up with the increased
| demand. To make matters worse most Netflix content is served
| directly from the ISPs network.
|
| This is a retarded symbolic policy to make it seem like a
| certain EU politician is doing something, when in fact it
| makes no difference what so ever.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| How about next Monday, when all of the EU are trying to
| remote-school and remote-work simultaneously. Will there
| still be bandwidth to spare? (genuine question, I don't
| know the answer)
| sgehly wrote:
| I don't mean to strawman but are you saying luxury businesses
| should be able to get away with not delivering on what their
| customers pay for because we are in an unexpected situation?
| miguelmota wrote:
| I'm no lawyer but I would think that there would be
| exceptions to their policies in times of crisis
| throwaway936482 wrote:
| Yes because the luxury business customer's wants to have
| the UHD they paid a small sum for do not trump other
| people's needs to be able to work from home in order to eat
| and keep the real economy working because of a pandemic.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Now we just need to establish that Netflix streaming is
| actually hurting working remotely.
| Angelwings93 wrote:
| that's fine, but how is that a retort to giving someone
| their money back after you can't provide that service
| anymore
| afarrell wrote:
| It's not a retort to that -- It's a retort to the person
| asking for their money back.
|
| It is saying "what you are upset about does not matter.
| Don't bother someone else with it", which is both an
| insult and correct.
| lorenzhs wrote:
| It's not Netflix that can't handle the load, though. It's
| your ISP. If there's anyone to be angry with, it's them.
| sgehly wrote:
| I'm not claiming that Netflix and other services
| shouldn't help out the ISPs, because you're right that
| WFH > Netflix, but if they can't deliver what their
| customers paid for, they should be sending partial
| refunds.
|
| It's really the issue on the part of the ISPs for not
| being able to provide enough service to support
| everyone's internet activity.
|
| If Netflix wants to help them out with that issue they
| also have to bear the cost of helping them out with that
| issue.
|
| If a university closes because of the pandemic they sure
| as hell won't charge room/board, and (if they're kind)
| won't charge as much for online courses.
|
| The price factor is irrelevant ("a small sum"), and if it
| is, Netflix should have no problem refunding "a small
| sum".
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| So companies can charge for products they can't deliver? Why
| should consumers bear the full brunt of the contractual price
| and not receive promised goods? It's not like we are stealing
| refunds from ordinary folks, these are heartless corporations
| (in USA) who squeeze every dime they can.
| bluedino wrote:
| Like the travel industry does with their non-refundable
| charges?
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Really? ISP's don't seem to be having issues with bandwidth
| anywhere, the only party which might be affected by this is
| Netflix itself since it's costs have likely skyrocketed since
| the quarantine and self-isolation began.
| akmarinov wrote:
| Man, if I was paying for me Netflix, I'd be upset...
| unethical_ban wrote:
| That's truly a good question - they could pull that data
| quickly and prorate people somehow. Maybe not for a bill
| already gone out, but perhaps going forward (even if they re-
| enable it).
|
| I'm not going to knock them for this, given that we're talking
| about keeping critical infrastructure from being overrun while
| the remainder of the economy works distributed.
| KevinEldon wrote:
| You should not knock Netflix at all. The request came from
| the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services.
| Netflix helped out when they were asked to. If Europeans are
| upset about this decision they need to take it up with their
| elected officials not Netflix.
| dependenttypes wrote:
| It was just a request. If any Netflix consumers have an
| issue with this they should take it with Netflix.
| KevinEldon wrote:
| No, in the same way that you wouldn't expect a refund if you
| personally chose to use less than 4K for a stream. In this case
| Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market
| and Services, has made that downgrade choice for all Europeans.
| Mirioron wrote:
| Isn't the EU just lovely?
|
| Question to downvoters: does it make sense that every part of
| the EU gets this degraded quality even if they have
| competently built IT infrastructure?
| dependenttypes wrote:
| > In this case Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for
| Internal Market and Services, has made that downgrade choice
| for all Europeans.
|
| They did not force Netflix to do it. Rather, they asked them.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Pretty sure they will have a clause in their TOS agreement to
| the terms of "we cannot control your ISPs network quality, or
| regulations placed upon us"
| dogma1138 wrote:
| No one has forced them to do so, not a single ISP seems to be
| having any issues.
| eganist wrote:
| Sounds like it's effective immediately, so if you don't like
| it, cut your plan. No one's on contract.
| whoo wrote:
| you pay a month in advance
| cortesoft wrote:
| Well, I hate to tell you the devastating news... you might
| have to eat the $3 this month.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| It's still bullshit.
| casefields wrote:
| All you need is a handful of small court claims to wake
| Netflix up. They'll spend a magnitude more on sending
| Netflix employees to represent them, than all these
| prorated refunds would cost.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Good luck with your small claims case for $3. Hope you
| brought your $25 filing fee!
| cortesoft wrote:
| While the whole world is trying to deal with the worst
| pandemic in 100 years, you are going to have to adjust
| your expectation levels for bullshit.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The technical needlessness of this decision has been
| thoroughly reviewed in this thread; therefore this is
| just a fear-based decision because of the panic. Why
| should anyone tolerate pointless moves like this to
| appease people that are panicking?
| miguelmota wrote:
| It's not a fear based decision. ISP companies sell more
| bandwidth than is actually available during peak times
| but because of everybody staying home now their services
| are oversubscribed creating slow downs or outages.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| The ISPs came out and said bandwidth isn't an issue.
| miguelmota wrote:
| Is there a link to the source? (not that I don't believe
| that but I just want to know the details)
| dogma1138 wrote:
| I don't think it's a fear based decision, it would
| without a doubt reduce their costs considerably.
|
| Netflix runs on AWS and while they are paying a special
| rate they are still paying through the nose.
|
| Netflix is operating at a loss, has a mountain of debt
| and it's most profitable when people maintain their
| yearly sub and binge 1 show ever 2-3 months basically the
| same way gyms make their money you pay for a year, go for
| 3 weeks in January a week before easter, few more weeks
| in late May - June and maybe then a bit after
| thanksgiving.
|
| Also I asked Netflix chat if this will be applied in the
| UK they told me yes but also told me 2 interesting
| things.
|
| 1) It will not affect all customers all the time, 2) it's
| up to 25% bitrate cut.
|
| I have a very strong suspicion that what Netflix is doing
| is basically a population wide A/B study on how reduction
| in bitrate will affect viewing habits during a time when
| people aren't likely to unsubscribe from their service.
|
| This will be quite invaluable to Netflix especially if
| they'll will find out things like different countries and
| different user profiles may have different tolerances to
| lowered bitrates.
|
| I don't care if people would think this is a tin foil hat
| conspiracy anyone who's thinking that Netflix would not
| have the data profiling how every user reacts to this
| change which could allow them to tweak bitrates on a per-
| user basis in the future hasn't seen any of their talks
| about just how they use viewer data to tailor their
| service.
| lorenzhs wrote:
| Netflix is not serving streams through AWS. They use AWS
| for everything _except_ serving streams. They 're
| spending around 15 billion per year on content, bandwidth
| costs are _far_ lower than that.
| cortesoft wrote:
| This is not how Netflix distributed their content at all.
| Most ISPs use their open connect system, which places a
| Netflix box inside their network. Content is streamed
| from there, which is cheaper for both the ISP and
| Netflix.
|
| https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
| martin8412 wrote:
| If you subscribe to an ISP of a decent size, then most of
| Netflix content is served directly from your ISPs
| network. Netflix has servers at edge locations all over
| the world. They want to serve as little content as
| possible from Amazon.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I'm fairly sure they don't serve _any_ content from
| Amazon.
|
| _edit_ I 'm pretty confident I'm right:
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/3427839/ten-years-
| on--... , https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2016/02/netfl...
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| Yeah, but not this kind of bullshit. How is COVID
| stopping Netflix from lowering their rates accordingly?
| afarrell wrote:
| Taking actions like changing billing code requires time
| and effort.
|
| COVID-19 requires spending time and effort on lots of
| things.
|
| Everything has an opportunity cost.
|
| Spend time and attention on things that matter.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Considering how often Netflix has jacked up my plan
| prices, I imagine they already have the billing code in
| place.
| Avamander wrote:
| The pandemic doesn't affect what are good business
| practises. I understand that Americans might be more
| lenient in those terms, but Europeans tend not to be.
| miguelmota wrote:
| I assure you that Americans are just as annoyed as
| Europeans when it comes to abrupt changes in service.
| leetcrew wrote:
| are you serious? not offering a refund when you fail to
| deliver the product is something that makes americans
| absolutely furious. it's one of the only sacred consumer
| protection issues here. I've already received billing
| credits or refunds for every service I'm subscribed to
| that's halted for coronavirus.
| _squared_ wrote:
| $3? Where I live (in Europe) the 4K plan is 15.99EUR a
| month. That's $17 USD. I pay less for my phone's data
| plan!
| isoskeles wrote:
| What's the next tier below that? Now subtract the one
| number from the other number, it should be less than
| 15.99.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I'd be pretty sure they'd refund you in Europe?
| jessaustin wrote:
| Aren't we talking about Europe?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Yes. Did they ask for a refund for unused services as
| part of their cancellation? It sounded more like they
| were just moaning (my fave past-time!).
|
| The "Europe" qualifier seemed necessary as many people on
| here aren't in Europe.
| throwaway55554 wrote:
| Why would they? Do they pay you back when your ISP can't
| provide enough bandwidth for 4K? How much is 4K on top of
| regular Netflix service? Is it worth worrying about?
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _How much is 4K on top of regular Netflix service?_
|
| 4 euro a month (or 33% increase).
| izacus wrote:
| Why would they? Because they charge extra for it and they're
| themselves have stopped providing this service.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >and they're themselves have stopped providing this service
| //
|
| Is it them, or is it overselling by ISPs?
| sp332 wrote:
| There's no evidence the ISPs were overloaded by Netflix
| traffic recently. Note that this conversation was with
| politicians, not ISPs.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| The EU commission stopped them providing 4k, not netflix
| throwaway55554 wrote:
| Weren't they told (or asked) to?
| tomaszs wrote:
| Lately i was looking for internet transfer data for last, say, 60
| days per day to confirm / reject claim transfer is higher now in
| Europe. But couldnt find it. And broken Google results does not
| help much. Do you know of any of such resources?
| axegon_ wrote:
| That explains a lot. Fair enough though
|
| > But it said viewers would still find the picture quality good.
|
| I beg to differ and I'm watching on my tablet in bed and it
| reminds me of the Avi files we used to watch on lan networks in
| the 90s.
| Fiveplus wrote:
| Are you in Europe? I'd love to know how are services like Hulu
| or YouTube holding up?
| Macha wrote:
| Hulu is a US exclusive service.
|
| YouTube is unfazed.
| schnable wrote:
| Interesting counterpoint to the "broadband is so much better in
| Europe" trope. Unless of course we are under strain here in the
| US as well....
| Avamander wrote:
| Such a blanket reduction is stupid, yes.
| this_user wrote:
| Europe is not a single county, and Internet connections are
| widely different for a variety of reasons. On one end of the
| spectrum you have the Nordic countries where the average
| connection has > 20 Mb/s, and at the other end of the spectrum
| you have Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus where it is below 10.
| alkonaut wrote:
| There are many aspects of good broadband (Competition, fiber
| access in rural areas etc). Europe is also a group of very
| different countries. There are many countries where most rural
| areas still rely on DSL connections, for example.
| _jal wrote:
| 'Better' can mean multiple things.
|
| I'm pretty sure you'd agree that paying 1/3rd of what you pay
| now for the same bandwidth is 'better'.
|
| Is there sufficient idle capacity to handle an nearly-overnight
| transition to whatever the load is now? I don't know, but
| suspect most ISPs are going to keep similar capacity buffers -
| nobody sells end consumers non-oversubscribed pipes.
| reallydontask wrote:
| I've just run four different speed tests and all say that I'm
| getting ~100/10 which is what my ISP advertises (Virgin Media
| in the UK)
|
| One of them shows a ping of 27 ms (I think it's normally ~ 10
| ms)
| rsynnott wrote:
| The US response has so far been fairly muted, with a few
| notable local exceptions. There are a lot more people stuck at
| home in Europe.
|
| In practice, though, at least in Ireland there's been little
| obvious problem, though you can definitely see an increase:
| https://www.inex.ie/ixp/statistics/ixp
| cortesoft wrote:
| Pretty much all of California is stuck at home, and
| California has 40 million people... that would be the 8th
| largest country in Europe.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Shelter in Place is basically just the Bay Area, right? And
| a lot of people still seem to be leaving the home for work
| there; notoriously, people are still making Teslas!
|
| Also, California is mostly fairly urbanised and well-off.
| If Germany was the only place in Europe where people were
| being discouraged from leaving the home, this would be less
| of a concern. This is really targeting places, especially
| rural places, with poor infrastructure.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I am in Los Angeles, and we have been told to stay home
| except for absolutely necessary trips to grocery stores
| or doctors.
|
| Also, there are very large parts of California that are
| rural.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Census 2000 found California's rural population totaled
| 1,876,753 persons
|
| That's about 5%, which is pretty low.
| desas wrote:
| It'd probably be the 6th largest in the eu. Smaller than
| Italy, France and Spain which all have lockdowns.
| monkpit wrote:
| Does anyone know if something like this graph exists for the
| US? I tried googling for one but I'm not sure of the right
| search terms to use.
| rsynnott wrote:
| It's a neutral exchange. Note that it doesn't give the
| whole story; really big players like Netflix may have
| hardware directly in some of the ISPs and bypass the
| exchange completely.
|
| The US doesn't have many significant neutral exchanges, but
| here's one: https://www.seattleix.net/statistics/
| trigger wrote:
| Possibly, but Netflix do peer in INEX,
| https://www.inex.ie/ixp/customer/detail/103
| rsynnott wrote:
| They do, but they likely also have equipment in many of
| the ISPs.
| gonesilent wrote:
| FCC is handing out extra radio spectrum as fast as it can.
| Took a bunch of white space channels gave them to TMobile.
| Letting some stay on 3.5ghz little longer before selling it
| off.
| ketzu wrote:
| Isn't the trope "broadband is better somewhere else" for most
| places? Anecdotally, most people I know complain about the
| connection where they live.
| ksec wrote:
| I have never heard any body complain about broadband speed
| from Japan, South Korea or Hong Kong. For parts of Europe,
| Such as Finland, Norway or Sweden are also mostly problem
| free.
|
| I then decide look up their average Internet speed [1], and
| turns out they are all in the Top 10.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Intern
| et_...
| nicolas_t wrote:
| I live in Hong Kong and I always complain about my
| broadband speed. I get 1GBPs but actually it's not true,
| the link to US is limited and is rather small given how
| many people use it so connections speed outside of HK is
| around 80mbps much much slower than I had in Europe or
| Japan.
|
| And the contract is for 24 months minimum, so if you leave
| the country before the end, you end up having to pay for
| the rest of your contract.
|
| But, in general, US ISPs are particularly bad in my
| experience (and worse even than HK)
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Europeans seem pretty proud of their Internet, at least
| relative to the US, for example:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22631036
| agumonkey wrote:
| it's mostly the cost/quality ratio, it's not asia levels of
| modernity (they seemed to be the first on most things) but
| it's accessible and stable
|
| on the other hand the web is filled with horror stories
| emanating from C....st customers.
| Hamuko wrote:
| As a European, I'm quite happy with my Internet
| connections.
| jbarberu wrote:
| Moving from Sweden to the US (Florida) I can't say I've
| noticed much of a difference in connectivity. 100, 200, 300 &
| 1000MBps is readily available in both places but usually
| around at 3x the price in the US.
|
| Rural America seems to be an entirely different story.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Silicon Valley here. My options are 20/1 DSL or cell. I
| chose cell.
| smkellat wrote:
| And my part of Rural America was supposed to have a local
| government broadband taskforce meeting next Tuesday. The
| county commissioner concerned won't reply saying whether
| the meeting is canceled or not though the emergency
| declaration said county offices are closed to the public. I
| sent the commissioner a message imploring him to find a way
| to keep the matter going as there will be an end to this
| crisis and our decaying, limited, legacy infrastructure
| that the local broadband incumbent is not investing in is
| holding us back.
|
| I'm not holding my breath.
| jcims wrote:
| 15M down / 768k up checking in from rural america. I have
| to stop my camera on video conferences if i want to talk.
| jbarberu wrote:
| Ouch :(
|
| Just checked, and at the address I left in Sweden I could
| have gotten a 1.2GBps for ~$60/mo, almost what I pay for
| 100MBps here...
| notJim wrote:
| My parents have been trying to get high speed internet
| for years. They're in a semi-rural, but suburbanizing
| area. They are surrounded by houses that have cable, but
| their house is older so it doesn't have it.
|
| They had microwave for a while, but it didn't work in bad
| weather, and then the trees got too tall. They've finally
| resorted to _paying the cable company_ thousands of
| dollars to bring cable to their house. It 's such a
| ridiculous opaque process though that my mom basically
| has to stalk cable vans in her area and give the tech an
| earful to get status updates. The good techs know how
| shitty the process is, and one even gave her his personal
| phone number. However, it's not his department, so his
| ability to make things happen is limited.
|
| She made the payment back in November, they got permits
| in January, and she hasn't heard from them since. I asked
| about how to get this done on DSLReports a while back,
| and the answer was to just keep calling them over and
| over and over, because every now and then you'd find
| someone with a clue.
| jcims wrote:
| I'm probably going to end up dropping $8-10k into a tower
| and point to point microwave links to two different
| cities. The ISP i'm on now wants $30K to put fiber in my
| house, but their network is so bad at the edge that i'd
| still need to get a loop to something else to get
| reasonable performance.
|
| I'd still do the tower and resell b/w to recoup some of
| the costs.
| ksec wrote:
| There should be a mandate that all new buildings should have
| Fibre Optic cables laid out just like electronics wires and
| Water pipes.
|
| Or even just a separate pipe for either Ethernet or Fibre
| Cables.
| unixhero wrote:
| You will
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I feel like when people are arguing that point, they are
| arguing about broadband _competition_. In most US markets your
| choices are not great and /or are expensive, and if you are in
| a market with limited competition there is often not a reason
| to invest in the network.
| bilekas wrote:
| > "broadband is so much better in Europe" trope
|
| Interesting how ISP's outside of the EU are uncapping their
| data limits all of a sudden..
|
| So when people (me included) say it's better in Europe, its
| because the vast majority of us are not capped.. In normal
| times.
|
| Sources : https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/12/21177538/att-
| broadband-in...
|
| https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-follows-optus-with-ex...
| Youden wrote:
| It's not a counterpoint. Netflix's actions, from a network
| perspective are not neccessary, at least not Europe-wide. My
| ISP is more than able to cope with it. I've been checking at
| peak times and I can consistently saturate my gigabit
| connection piping traffic to/from Amsterdam, about 800km away.
|
| Maybe Netflix feels the need for its own business reasons (e.g.
| it pays for some of its bandwidth and now users are using
| enough that they're unprofitable) but it's not needed to ensure
| the integrity of Europe's networks.
|
| Were it necessary, the ISPs can simply shape Netflix and let
| adaptive bitrate take care of the user experience, the same way
| mobile ISPs do in the US.
| refurb wrote:
| I had the exact same thought. I was under the impression that
| Europe had much more robust broadband infrastructure and a
| surplus of capacity, compared to the US.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Finland at least has uncapped mobile connections up the
| wazoo. Also the highest amount of mobile data per head in
| 2016 at least:
| https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/11448.jpeg
|
| Edit: same for 2018 as well:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/956188/monthly-mobile-
| da...
| rsynnott wrote:
| On average, yes, probably. But both the US and Europe have
| areas (especially rural areas) with very poor coverage, and
| in much of Europe most people are staying at home at the
| moment, to a much greater extent than in the US.
| MrSouth wrote:
| This move is just a solution in search of a problem. We still
| have better internet than you in ALL places, including mobile
| connectivity, literally everywhere. I can say fiber to the home
| 250/250 & coax 500/500 dominate the market. There is pumped up
| ADSL everywhere country-side. This move is coming unilateraly
| from a person who doesn't understand internet and woke up and
| had to be busy with something. Many IX report a slight increase
| in capacity, from 10% to 20%.
| aembleton wrote:
| Fibre to the home definitely doesn't dominate the market in
| the UK!
|
| Maybe we're far behind the rest of Europe but as we are part
| of Europe, then it isn't that great 'literally everywhere'.
| Symbiote wrote:
| You can't generalise all of the European Union like that.
| bjoli wrote:
| I pay $30 for 250/100 and i live 20 minutes outside a town if
| 120k in a small community of 25 houses, about 7 km from the
| nearest store of any kind.
|
| Is that competitive? I have no idea. I could however chose from
| around 10 ISPs that all have to compete in the network, which I
| understand is quite rare on the other side of the pond.
| aembleton wrote:
| Where are you? There are many different deals across Europe;
| many aren't as good as what you have.
| mindslight wrote:
| Kodi and mpv continue to work as normal...
| olyjohn wrote:
| My stash of BluRay rips are still working at full quality as
| well.
| karatestomp wrote:
| Jellyfin is _really_ nice if you have a semi-powerful, wired-
| network machine to run it on. Former Kodi user, now a convert.
|
| Kodi on an Rpi makes a good cast target for it, though.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I've gone for Infuse and Apple TV 4K, since I haven't been
| able to find anything as fast as the 4K Apple TV that's not
| an actual computer.
| slenk wrote:
| I am using Emby, since that seems to be the only one of those
| platforms that can handle IPTV
| mongol wrote:
| What is semipowerful, approximately?
| softwarejosh wrote:
| i severely lucked out being in a college town during all this, so
| many people just left the town, our networks are blazing :P
| N0RMAN wrote:
| So they are throttling because they can't fulfill the demand and
| want to save money on network traffic?
| StreamBright wrote:
| Torrent as means of distribution would have been just perfect for
| the bandwidth.
| gandalfian wrote:
| So they are rolling out gigabit fibre in homes but 5mbs is
| overloading the system?
| mabbo wrote:
| Everyone's road is big enough to drive to their home, yet if we
| all got on the same highway at once it would be a traffic jam.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Just because they're selling you Gigabit, doesn't mean that
| they actually have the capacity to provide you a guaranteed
| Gigabit pipe. They're overprovisioning their network and hoping
| that not enough people want to max their connection out at the
| same time.
| op00to wrote:
| In other words, a bill of goods.
| sniperjzp wrote:
| This is interesting, would YouTube cut the quality too? If no,
| does this mean Netflix has much higher traffic than YouTube?
| navidr wrote:
| It is kind of unrelated to this, but I am asking maybe somebody
| could help me. Do you guys know where can I read and learn more
| about the details of the Netflix network? I looked at their
| technical blog, but I wanted something more detailed and
| technical. Is there something like Netflix research papers (e.g.
| Google published Bigtable IIRC).
| rckclmbr wrote:
| Its not a whitepaper, but look into OpenConnect, since i
| believe thats how they serve a majority of traffic
|
| https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
| vimslayer wrote:
| This is totally offtopic but since bunch of people are talking
| about torrenting here I figured I'd ask - are you getting
| subtitles from somewhere?
|
| I think my English is pretty good but still watching shows
| without subs feels like it takes more work and doesn't let me
| focus on the content.
|
| I used to use opensubtitles.org but it's gotten from difficult to
| use to impossible to use due to all the popups and crap like
| that.
| bilekas wrote:
| I was working with a semi-competitor of Netflix a few years back
| and their tech is great of course, their product offering is
| amazing, but their real magic is with their contracts with ISP's.
|
| I don't know the details of the contracts of course, but they are
| likely to get a dedicated bandwidth within the ISP, if that comes
| under strain, of course, that contract comes into play. So I
| think it's not just the datacenters involved..
| ilogik wrote:
| https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| similar to the other discussion thread about this.... what is
| this based on? Who's pressuring who to get a meeting with Netflix
| to make this kind of request?
| syntaxing wrote:
| Kind of off topic, but has anyone used Nvidia's Shield TV "AI
| Upscaling"? Super curious if it would make the viewing experience
| better for situations like this.
| BenJong-Il wrote:
| A few months ago there was blog post posted here from a guy
| making movie reviews. In the blog post he described how he
| managed to get 4k Netflix screenshots on his Chromecast. The
| effort he made was enormous and involved reverse engineering the
| Netflix data protocol (I probably worded this wrong).
|
| When doing that he found out that Netflix streaming in 4k isn't
| actually 4k.
|
| Again not exactly sure how this worked but that was the result.
| And he put some kind of device between the Chromecast and the TV.
| And at the end of the post he shared his top movies of the year
| or in the previous post.
|
| Does anyone know what I am talking about? I've thought about this
| pist several times in the past weeks.
| Youden wrote:
| It looks like he didn't reverse-engineer the Netflix data
| protocol. What he did is use a HDCP-stripper box to get access
| to a raw decoded HDMI signal. The HDCP-stripper also had a
| screenshot function which he used to get snapshots of the video
| he was playing.
|
| He also monitored how much network traffic was being used while
| playing Netflix videos to get an estimate of the bitrate that
| was being played. The 4K videos were consistently around
| 18Mbps, which is reasonable.
|
| FWIW, you can (normally) get a HDCP stripper from AliExpress
| for $10. This isn't particularly exotic hardware.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| On a related note, if you watch Netflix in Chrome or Firefox
| then you're only getting a resolution of 720p.
| Google Chrome Up to 720p on Windows, Mac, and Linux
| Up to 1080p on Chrome OS Internet Explorer up to 1080p
| Microsoft Edge up to 4K* Mozilla Firefox up to 720p
| Opera up to 720p Safari up to 1080p on Mac OS X 10.10.3
| or later *Streaming in 4K requires an HDCP 2.2
| compliant connection to a 4K capable display, Intel's
| 7th generation Core CPU, and the latest Windows updates.
| Check with the manufacturer of your system to verify
| specifications.
|
| From: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
|
| I really wish they'd just allow up to 4K streaming on all main
| browsers. The Windows 10 app is awful and very buggy for multi-
| monitor setups. The two main issues I run into with it are:
|
| 1. The video will stutter unless I set both my monitors to the
| same refresh rate. As you can imagine, it's somewhat annoying
| to have to lower the refresh rate of my main monitor from 144Hz
| to 60Hz whenever I want to watch Netflix.
|
| 2. When playing in fullscreen on one monitor, the video will
| randomly minimize if I interact with _any_ applications on my
| second monitor! So if I want to look something up online or
| whatever as I 'm watching, I _have to_ switch to windowed mode
| or I risk having the video just minimize and mute itself.
| marzell wrote:
| Microsoft _really_ wants users signed in to a Microsoft
| account on Windows. One of their main leverages for this is
| encouraging people to use the app store in Windows, which
| doesn 't fully work if you're just logged in to a local
| account
| valvar wrote:
| It doesn't? Seems to work fine for me...
| BenJong-Il wrote:
| That sounds awful.
|
| I'm on MacOS Mojave and the main issue I have with Netflix is
| that every few minutes there is a white flash for a few ms.
| In Safari and Chrome if i remember correctly. But I never
| investigated that as I don't stream a lot.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Also, for 5.1 surround sound, no browser will do, you must
| use the Windows 10 app. (That's if you're playing from a PC,
| of course.)
|
| https://help.netflix.com/en/node/14163
|
| > I really wish they'd just allow up to 4K streaming on all
| main browsers
|
| Do all the major browsers support this?
| jandrese wrote:
| Note that if you pirate 1080p or 4k content you'll always get
| the full resolution you asked for.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| Not always at a great bitrate though.
|
| I haven't really torrented anything in a while but I doubt
| there are many 20GB+ Blu-ray quality rips out there that
| you can download in a reasonable amount of time.
|
| EDIT: after reading the replies I stand corrected; it seems
| like there are some better quality uploads out there than I
| thought.
| kodt wrote:
| There are plenty, 30-40GB uncompressed BluRay remux rips
| are very common. Will download in under 15 minutes.
|
| You can also find uncompressed 60-70GB UHD rips.
| fredoliveira wrote:
| You'd be very surprised.
| capableweb wrote:
| > reasonable amount of time
|
| Depends very much on your own bandwidth. For someone with
| 400Mbps, 20GB+ doesn't take that long time to download in
| the end, especially popular torrents.
|
| But then again, not many have that kind of bandwidth
| available.
| deno wrote:
| Availability aside (bluray rips are a thing), most people
| can't tell the difference between FullHD and 4K at all,
| at least in moving pictures[1]. I doubt bitrate will make
| much difference on top of that, as long as you start from
| some reasonable value.
|
| I seriously can't tell the difference between a very low
| quality YIFY rip and a proper Bluray. If you freeze frame
| they both look bad, and when they're moving they both
| look great. I've done this as an experiment multiple
| times and it's like judging wine... There's a threshold
| you need to pass but beyond that you quickly run into
| diminishing returns.
|
| [1] BTW most movies are still mastered or partially
| mastered (SFX) at 1080p still, and even if they're true
| 4K you get high quality downscale to 1080p for free. But
| really most 4K movies are still upscaled from 1080p.
| Bnshsysjab wrote:
| I'd rather see 60-144hz before any increases in
| resolution above 1080p and maybeeee 4K.
|
| I think lower quality rips show themselves a bit more on
| high quality playback devices, but I generally don't hit
| low quality releases purely for Snob factors so I could
| be wrong.
| dylz wrote:
| Are movies actually made in 144 FPS?
| gowld wrote:
| Movies look like garbage in >30fps.
|
| That's why moviemakers beg audiences not to do frame
| interpolation.
| kingo55 wrote:
| Using Sonarr you can specify minimum bitrates to
| download. It fetches content automatically in the
| background for you.
| MiroF wrote:
| Very common.
| Lammy wrote:
| At least it will be the same bitrate every time :)
|
| The keyword you should be searching for is "remux", as in
| identical video/audio streams to a BD but in a new
| container (probably MKV).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| If you pirate it originally yourself, sure.
|
| Pirated content from other people that lies about what it
| is isn't unheard of, though.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| Not unheard of, but uncommon. Typically the uploader will
| list the particulars of his precious file in extreme
| detail. Video resolution down to the pixel, framerate,
| mean bitrate and the exact settings and version of the
| libx264 codec software used...
| skeletonjelly wrote:
| Depends on your sources!
| kingo55 wrote:
| What a joke. We're punished for being paying customers.
|
| It's like the oppressive DRM that hurts actual paying
| customers of games rather than the pirates who circumvent
| it.
| gowld wrote:
| And shoplifting is also easier than waiting in line at
| checkout.
| majewsky wrote:
| That's true as a quip, but what's also true is that
| piracy flourishes if and only if there are no comfortable
| means of obtaining content legally. Music piracy was a
| big thing until it basically dropped dead from one day to
| the other when music streaming services like Spotify
| packed all music into one easy subscription. I would also
| say that movie piracy also dropped significantly when
| Netflix subscriptions became mainstream (not necessarily
| in terms of number of available movies, but certainly in
| terms of market share).
| tazjin wrote:
| This is generally how the media industry works. Paying
| for content (online at least) is almost always more
| complex, less flexible and lower quality.
|
| Add to that the various geographical restrictions (have
| the audacity to live outside of the US? No content for
| you!) and piracy becomes quite attractive.
| Bnshsysjab wrote:
| This started with DVDs that had unskippable anti piracy
| messages that piracy tools would either bypass or
| automatically enable skippability.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Wow, they should really make that clearer, especially since
| IIRC they charge for 4K streaming...
|
| This is probably how they get away with providing 4K without
| destroying their network: by making people think they are
| getting 4K when most are really are just watching 720p
| iso947 wrote:
| If you don't realise it's not 4K, maybe it's not worth the
| extra cost
| TomMarius wrote:
| Yeah, that's why they should say something. I was not
| aware I was getting lower quality, I thought the movies
| look awful.
| gowld wrote:
| Why are you paying for it?
| [deleted]
| Zopieux wrote:
| These numbers seem to roughly map DRM "security levels" and
| allowed resolution levels. Basically, on platforms that
| support hardware Widevine (or some other DRM product) ie.
| "strongest security", 1080p+ is allowed, as there is a low
| risk of the warez Scene(tm) being able to tap the decrypted
| media - HDMI splitters that can strip HDCP 2.2 are hard to
| come by.
|
| On platforms with only software DRM (tl;dr an obfuscated
| binary blob distributed along your browser that does some
| form of AES decryption), only low resolution streams are
| available because there is a good chance some folks somewhere
| have tooling to intercept the decrypted media.
| mikkelam wrote:
| This is really driving me nuts... Netflix is consistently
| giving me subpar resolution in firefox. It's quite rare that
| I even get 720p. Yet switching to microsoft edge, boom
| suddenly it's great.
|
| There used to be some extensions to switch the resolution up
| on chrome and firefox, but I do believe they're not working
| anymore.
|
| Another case for piracy I guess.
| Fripplebubby wrote:
| > Another case for piracy I guess.
|
| The notion here is, because of these annoying steps and
| gotchas, there will not be 4k rips of their content
| floating around. I don't keep up on the piracy scene these
| days but I have to imagine that it can still be done, as
| with the setup from the blog. So goes the story of DRM, it
| is a painful step that doesn't quite prevent piracy - but
| if you're netflix or other streaming services, you're
| working closely with the implementors of the DRM tech
| (microsoft, widevine, others) and you're not going to just
| throw in the towel given that it's always a work in
| progress.
|
| Sometimes there are also licensing requirements around
| having DRM attached, probably applies to Netflix in certain
| cases (although less and less these days).
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I believe this is because Edge is capable of decrypting and
| displaying DRM-protected 4K streams. I don't think it's
| just Netflix being difficult.
| SCHiM wrote:
| This is because of DRM integrations. If any part of the
| chain between netflix and secure memory in your display
| cannot be verified, or does not meet some standard, you get
| the degraded experience.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Change user-agent to impersonate Edge.
|
| This is why I won't pay for premium resolution upgrades.
| It's too much of a hassle to ensure the entire video chain
| is providing what I paid for.
| jdnenej wrote:
| It's more than that, Edge has far more DRM in it.
| coribuci wrote:
| > When doing that he found out that Netflix streaming in 4k
| isn't actually 4k.
|
| Well, after so many people praising streaming i wanted to check
| what this means. According to wikipedia the server adapts to
| the clients bandwidth. So you can get UHD with the quality of
| mpeg1.
|
| > Does anyone know what I am talking about? I've thought about
| this pist several times in the past weeks.
|
| Yes. That's why i decided that streaming is not really a
| solution.
|
| It is really amazing how they are selling crap claiming that
| they have better quality. Damn, even an AM transmission sounds
| better.
| rwol wrote:
| This one? https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2019/02/14/adventures-
| in-netfli...
| wmf wrote:
| There's nothing in there about 4K not being 4K, just some
| griping about low bitrates.
|
| On computers you can access some debug stats https://www.redd
| it.com/r/netflix/comments/2fkylx/hidden_netf... and Roku also
| has it https://community.roku.com/t5/Channel-Issues-
| Questions/Someh...
| nrp wrote:
| I think in the end the author's only complaint was that it
| was difficult to figure out what bitrate the Chromecast was
| streaming at, is a pretty minor problem. It reads like a
| complaint post, but that seems to just be the author's
| writing style.
| BenJong-Il wrote:
| Exactly! I also just found it. Don't know how I didn't manage
| to find it before. The comments were quite critical.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669234
| itcrowd wrote:
| I think this is the one you need. Interesting, thanks for the
| suggestion to search for it!
|
| https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2019/02/14/adventures-in-netfli...
| jiveturkey wrote:
| epic
| ehsankia wrote:
| I did not read the whole thing, but could it simply be that
| Netflix detects whatever technique the author is trying to
| use and that something is up, so it defaults to non-4K
| streaming?
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| Best approach is just cancel Netflix (saying this was the reason)
| and go back to the torrents -- they will still have the best
| quality.
|
| They are lowering quality (of service or the catalog size, not
| always video) and keeping or increasing the prices for a while.
| Using a global pandemic as an excuse is just a new low.
| echelon wrote:
| Hogging bandwidth is detrimental to everyone, especially
| emergency personnel. Please don't do this. The government
| wouldn't ask if there wasn't a need. The alternative is having
| everyone's internet cut outright.
| leetcrew wrote:
| > The government wouldn't ask if there wasn't a need.
|
| I wish I lived in this blissful world.
| martin8412 wrote:
| I'm sorry - I'm sure you mean well, but this is downright
| false. This is not the US. In most European countries
| bandwidth is plentiful and this is completely unneeded
| political intervention based on not understanding technology.
| ISPs do actually upgrade their infrastructure without it
| being past collapse in Europe.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| What an utter joke. This is only needed because unlike the
| backbone operators who are pushing ridiculous record traffic
| through the IXs these days and don't even hit any limit on their
| capability, the last-mile operators have _not_ done any major
| investments in their infrastructure.
|
| Cable TV internet is horribly oversold - Kabel Deutschland was
| already infamous, when they got bought up by Vodafone shit got
| even worse. DSL ... let's just say most of Germany is happy to
| have 16/1 ADSL. I have 100/10 FTTB via M-net and even they have
| load problems.
|
| Cellphone internet is even worse but as data is horribly
| expensive in Germany no one dares streaming Netflix over that
| anyway...
|
| tl;dr: it's not Netflix fault, it's last mile telcos who have
| done jack shit the last decade to build out new FTTP infra
| coupled with appropriate uplink capacity to the nearest IX, but
| people are too dumb to understand this and blame Netflix instead
| of directing their anger towards politicians and telcos where it
| belongs!
| dewey wrote:
| > Cellphone internet is even worse but as data is horribly
| expensive in Germany no one dares streaming Netflix over that
| anyway...
|
| Luckily we have net-neutrality infringing features like
| Telekom's "Stream On" where it's included /s
| [deleted]
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| Isn't this sort of rationing exactly the thing that anti-Net
| Neutrality advocates have been warning about?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Can't tell if that "anti-" should be there or not...
| Hamuko wrote:
| There might be special circumstances afoot.
| codazoda wrote:
| I don't think so. This is one company reducing the quality of
| their own content.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| No, that would be the ISP playing "you can't use Netflix or
| Zoom unless you pay for Super Premium." This is the services
| themselves downgrading to handle the highest peak service they
| will ever see.
| op00to wrote:
| Not just that. Eyeball network ISPs also shake down companies
| like Netflix with extortionate fees when peering points are
| overloaded to upgrade the connection.
| zymhan wrote:
| Net neutrality is the idea that your ISP shouldn't deprioritize
| content from someone else in order to benefit their own
| competing service.
|
| For example, Comcast not counting their on-demand, over the
| internet, streaming against your data cap. Whereas watching
| Netflix/hulu/etc would count against it.
| rococode wrote:
| I've been having major internet issues lately (Seattle area),
| have had 4 techs come try to figure it out. Yesterday's tech
| finally correctly diagnosed the problem as happening before the
| connection reaches our home but was unsure of the cause. He
| called his supervisor to investigate, and they found that the
| capacity for our neighborhood's node was nearly at 100%, while
| ideally it should always be under 80%. Fortunately they said
| they'll be able to fix it within a few weeks by doing a node
| split. The tech mentioned he'd never heard of capacity issues
| before in his ~20 years as a tech and that some smaller ISPs have
| been having issues keeping their internet up and running at all.
|
| I've been tracking the performance with PingPlotter, if you're
| curious how bad it is right now here's the last 10 minutes:
| https://i.imgur.com/AnUqv3j.png (red lines are packet loss)
| Pretty interesting how current circumstances are pushing even
| tried and tested infrastructure to their limits.
| texthompson wrote:
| If you didn't know, that 80% number is probably the result of
| Little's Law. That's the result where if your demand is
| generated by a Poisson process, and your service has a queue,
| 80% utilization of the service is where the probability of an
| infinite queue starts to get really high. People
|
| Here's a nice blog post about the subject:
|
| https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/01/30/server-utilization...
| lxgr wrote:
| This law does not apply to queueing as encountered in
| routers. It assumes unbounded queues and a poisson arrival
| process (i.e. a memoryless channel); both assumptions don't
| hold for packet routers and senders using congestion control
| (TCP or otherwise).
|
| There is, however, a high chance of encountering buffer bloat
| if countermeasures are not taken at the chokepoint:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat
|
| Modern cable modems, for example, are required to implement
| such countermeasures. My ISP is at over 90% capacity and
| round trip times are still mostly reasonable. (Bandwidth is
| atrocious, of course.)
| kitteh wrote:
| Comcast's last mile network in Seattle has been struggling in
| some areas from the morning until around 4 to 5 PM. It's not
| massive loss, but enough to disrupt video conference. Run a mtr
| towards an Internet dest and you'll see loss at the first hop
| and everything behind it.
| op00to wrote:
| Mtr isn't a reliable measure of packet loss. Routers drop
| "extra" packets like ping before they drop "paying" packets.
| lxgr wrote:
| mtr uses UDP data packets, as far as I am aware.
|
| Yes, the ICMP response packets could still be skewed, and
| the effect you mention is definitely real, but on a good
| connection, usually there should not be much to drop at
| all, neither TCP/UDP traffic nor ICMP packets.
| kitteh wrote:
| Yes I'm well aware of routers policing TTL=1 packets, but
| if you see consistent loss all the way down it's usually a
| sign. This compared to seeing individual spikes on
| intermediate routers which are usually control plane
| policing.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > have had 4 techs come try to figure it out
|
| Doesn't sound ideal for distancing.
| op00to wrote:
| The tech was full of shit. This happens literally all the time.
| You probably won't get a "node split" unless more people loudly
| complain. It's cheaper for them to roll a tech and hope you get
| fed up than it is to actually fix the problem.
| lxgr wrote:
| My ISP has been playing the same game with me for months. I
| finally cancelled the contract when it was about to renew,
| and I got a very interesting winback call from sales:
|
| Not only did the rep freely share the utilization numbers
| with me (80% during the day and 90% at night), he also
| mentioned that things would not get better until end of the
| year when they would do a node split.
|
| As consolation, they offered me 10x the download speed for
| half the price. I'm not really sure how that would help
| congestion...
| iagovar wrote:
| I work in this field in Spain. Margins in this sector are
| slim, deployment is expensive. EVERYONE works with
| simultaneity rates, it's the only way to have cheap
| connections.
|
| In fiber connections is actually not that expensive to
| split a fiber after a CTO, you can actually sort of daisy
| chain it, but you want to keep everything as standard as
| possible.
| martin_bech wrote:
| I've worked at a major ISP, for a decade, and spotting
| something like this should be so easy to spot. There are tools
| on monitoring of load all the time, and areas are routibely
| getting split etc. to improve bandwith, so I think your ISP are
| basicly amateurs..
| fibers wrote:
| how can i as a subscriber find out whats the capacity?
| lxgr wrote:
| It used to be possible to determine the downlink capacity
| and even current usage with a DVB-C receiver and some Linux
| software, since DOCSIS is essentially just IP encapsulated
| in MPEG transport streams on a digital TV channel.
|
| More recent versions of DOCSIS have moved away from that
| layer of backwards compatibility, so you would probably
| need some specialised equipment, if it is possible at all
| (I don't know at what layer exactly encryption happens).
| cpitman wrote:
| Alternatively, load has gone up across the board in a short
| period of time, so that preventive scaling has fallen behind
| and are in recovery mode.
| martin_bech wrote:
| Yes it can, but why would it take several techs, to spot
| something like load, which is the first thing you would do,
| it should take no more than 10s to look it up in a tool.
| sulam wrote:
| A "last foot" tech might not even have access to those
| tools, much less know how to use them.
| rwbhn wrote:
| Rolling out that tech has got to be more expensive than
| checking the load first.
| toyg wrote:
| Dunno how it is in the States, but here in UK rolling out
| the tech is basically the first thing they do after the
| unavoidable "have you tried turning it on and off again"
| phone call. They just don't trust the customer to have
| any clue and maybe don't want to waste time doing
| troubleshooting at their end when it's "probably" a
| downstream issue.
| op00to wrote:
| Not amateurs, liars.
| dawnerd wrote:
| So Frontier?
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| How does it come about that the ISPs Network Operations team
| didn't know they were saturating a link?
|
| Last ISP I worked at would have email and SMS notifications
| going to On Call staff.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Is this for the entirety of Europe? Because I imagine we're not
| having any issues with this in Finland.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| It's a made up problem. In Germany, journalists asked the
| network providers and they said everything is fine.
|
| Such a ridiculous and pointless thing to do by the EU.
| Especially since all the apps drop the quality automatically
| anyway if the connection is slow.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Would any ISP actually openly say that it's "not fine"? Are
| these publicly owned companies? Wouldn't be risky to your
| business if you admitted things are not fine or that they are
| on the edge of capacity?
| Skunkleton wrote:
| I think the point is to protect things like remote desktop,
| zoom, etc from being pushed out by netflix traffic.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Isn't that mostly a QoS issue?
| wmf wrote:
| The Internet doesn't have QoS.
| matsur wrote:
| Last mile networks do.
| wmf wrote:
| Yeah, but nobody trusts ISPs to prioritize traffic;
| that's what the decade of net neutrality discussion has
| been about. If they start prioritizing Zoom over Netflix
| now, it just opens the door to continuing that
| prioritization (for pay) after the crisis.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I'm not sure if I buy the argument that doing something
| weird during a state of emergency is a valid cause to
| keep doing it outside of it.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| @Hamuko you don't need to buy it, the ISP owners will
| quickly buy that argument for you :)
| Hamuko wrote:
| And the EU can then take action against the ISPs. The EU
| hasn't been particularly hands off.
| geggam wrote:
| Try tunneling things thru VOIP packets and see if you
| notice a difference
| mattnewton wrote:
| Sounds like an ISP issue.
| aarroyoc wrote:
| It's not an invented problem. In Spain, ISPs like Telefonica
| and Vodafone are posting tweets are telling newspapers that
| people need to use the Internet with responsibility [0]. They
| also passed a law yesterday that allows ISPs to close
| connections if they know they're being used to spam the
| network.
|
| Maybe in Germany is different because people are more used to
| work from home or just being at home while watching Netflix
| but Spanish people like to go out a lot and now the network
| needs to serve all these people as well.
|
| [0]: https://www.xatakamovil.com/movil-y-sociedad/operadores-
| se-u...
| martin8412 wrote:
| They're talking about a 50% increase in voice and 25% in
| data on mobile networks. The problem is not the wired home
| connections. In fact, they even suggest that you use your
| landline for talking instead of the mobile networks.
| bluegreyred wrote:
| "the internet" from a dedicated fiber line is not the same
| as "the internet" from a oversubscribed 3G cell tower in
| the same country.
|
| Running better/more aggressive last mile QoS in the
| affected regions would make more sense to me, though I can
| see the advantage of netflix throttling "voluntarily"
| because this approach may avoid net neutrality violations.
| ritchiea wrote:
| Here in Berlin my DSL connection has been awful since the
| social distancing began. And many of my friends have
| complained of similar problems. Frequent disconnections,
| broken up zoom calls. Though ironically the streaming has
| been fine from both Netflix & Amazon.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I think Zoom has been having some issues. In Ireland, I
| haven't seen any actual Zoom breakages, but the maximum
| resolution I'm now seeing is 640x360. A week ago if someone
| had a decent webcam it would do 1080p.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| I've had disconnected Zoom calls here (Netherlands) as
| well, but it seems that's just Zoom not being able to
| handle the traffic because Google Hangouts and MS Teams are
| both fine. And Netflix and Disney+ are also working fine.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Didn't MS Teams already go down once due to the
| additional traffic in Europe?
| akadruid1 wrote:
| It could be that they don't have local edge servers in
| the Netherlands, we are using Zoom very heavily here in
| the UK and its working well with our colleagues here and
| in the US but some European countries including
| Netherlands are breaking up or disconnecting. I think
| Zoom are using AWS.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| If streaming works, but zoom doesn't, maybe the issue is
| with the zoom servers?
| ritchiea wrote:
| I've had other disconnections and sporadic complete DSL
| outages during the day. It might be there's more traffic
| during the day when people are performing work duties
| from home.
|
| Netflix might also be good enough at queuing up
| downloaded portions of the film ahead of time that the
| brief outages don't affect the viewing experience.
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| Rather the differences between protocols employed.
| Streaming video can be sent in chunks where latency
| doesn't matter that much (within certain tolerances, of
| course.) Realtime voice and video doesn't have that.
| hobofan wrote:
| German ISPs to public: "Everything is fine!"
|
| German ISPs to EU representative: "Could you please ask
| Netflix to turn down the traffic so we don't look too bad?"
|
| Not too hard to imagine, is it?
| op00to wrote:
| More like German ISPs to EU Representative: oh noes we got
| caught overselling remember when I gave you all that money
| now please ask Netflix to slow down
| [deleted]
| Shivetya wrote:
| it is a no cost request for a government official to make and
| gives them a ready out should things go wrong, in that they
| can point and say "if only they had done what _I_ asked "
| dogma1138 wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if there is a problem, on Netflix's
| side.
|
| As in this puts too much stress and thus too high of a cost
| on their end.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| No issues in the Netherlands either, we have a lot of cable
| (250 or 500mbit) and fiber (similar speeds) connections so I
| guess they're used to this amount of traffic.
|
| I guess this kind of thing is more for rural DSL lines in other
| countries? Or maybe central London :-), they still have a lot
| of homes only connected by ancient copper telephone cables.
| robocat wrote:
| There's so much that seems wrong about this.
|
| 1: home network capacity used to be at peak around 7PM IIRC.
| There should be significant spare headroom on the network during
| the working day.
|
| 2: Netflix already downgrades when bandwidth is limited. The
| smart move would be to tell Netflix to downgrade more
| aggressively, on the theory that would allow more "important"
| traffic to get priority, while still allowing people to watch
| Netflix (important to keep people from social contact!), and not
| affecting quality for consumers where ISP capacity isn't an issue
| (edit: added clause).
|
| 3: Allow individual ISPs to ignore agreements and bandwidth limit
| Netflix traffic from their POPs, if ISPs are having capacity
| issues.
|
| This seems political, possibly pushed by Netflix so they can sell
| more subscriptions while having a third party to blame for
| reducing service levels. Or maybe just knee jerk dumb reactions
| from politicians - stupidity seems like an option too!?
|
| Edit: I keep being amazed at how consumerism drives side
| benefits. Without Netflix and gamers, how much worse off would we
| all be right now?
| rsynnott wrote:
| > There should be significant spare headroom on the network
| during the working day.
|
| Remember that essentially every kid in Europe is home from
| school right now.
|
| > Netflix already downgrades when bandwidth is limited.
|
| It downgrades when bandwidth constraints and congestion start
| bothering _it_. By the time all the Netflixes which are
| competing with you do so, your Zoom conference will be long
| gone. Netflix is quite tolerant of an unreliable network. Many
| work-from-home things, VC in particular, less so.
| itg wrote:
| Regarding point 1, I imagine capacity is much higher during
| working hours due to so many people working from home.
| majewsky wrote:
| > home network capacity used to be at peak around 7PM IIRC.
| There should be significant spare headroom on the network
| during the working day.
|
| That's because people used to be in the office over the day.
| Now many are working from home and thus at home all day.
| dabei wrote:
| Are they going to deliver the lower quality videos with AV1?
| fdghfg wrote:
| "how to lose a large portion of your customers in 30 days"
| quotemstr wrote:
| This sucks. If bandwidth were metered, the market would ration is
| appropriately. Generally speaking, anything "free" or "unlimited"
| gets misallocated. When you put a price on something, it gets
| better.
| iptrans wrote:
| What's the point of rationing something that costs a hundredth
| of a cent per GB?
|
| You get 10TB of bandwidth for a dollar. Once average usage per
| subscriber goes over that, then we can talk.
| wtallis wrote:
| I think the real problem is that the supply is too inelastic.
| The marginal cost of delivering more data is trivial, until
| part of your network gets congested, and then your short-term
| options are limited. This is the same problem that water
| utilities often face: it's cheap, until you run out.
|
| Assigning a single rate ($/TB) requires you to make some
| assumptions that are at risk of being violated in exceptional
| circumstances. Using variable pricing to charge more during
| peak hours is too complicated for consumers to keep track of
| and their options for changing behavior are limited, so this
| earns the ISP more money but doesn't eliminate congestion
| during peak hours.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > Using variable pricing to charge more during peak hours
| is too complicated for consumers to keep track of
|
| Why? It works for electricity.
| wtallis wrote:
| Peak vs off-peak prices for electricity aren't that far
| apart--up to a factor of 3 in my area for residential
| service. And that's for a fixed schedule of
| peak/shoulder/off-peak hours. More dynamic demand-based
| pricing of electricity _doesn 't_ work all that well for
| residential service; it basically requires automated
| load-shifting that's far more practical for industrial
| customers than residential.
|
| The cost curve for internet service during peak hours is
| a lot steeper. I think it would take much more than a 3x
| price multiplier during peak hours to get any noticeable
| demand reduction beyond what streaming applications
| already do by dropping down to lower resolutions
| automatically. (Assuming that the base cost for off-peak
| usage is remotely realistic, ie. orders of magnitude
| lower than the metered prices we pay for cellular data in
| the US.)
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Maybe if we had kept using bittorrent for TV distribution we
| wouldn't have so much global traffic downloading "The Avengers"
| for the millionth time, you would just download it from the
| nearest host (also the way the internet worked before HTTPS,
| there used to be way more local caching of content being
| downloaded over and over again)
| amelius wrote:
| Except residential upload speeds are usually only 1/10th of the
| corresponding download speed.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Yeah, but my residential conncetion is 1000/100.
| Sosh101 wrote:
| Maybe 10 years ago? I don't know anyone with a connection
| that badly asymmetrical.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| 230 mb Down/ 5 mb up. Xfinity near Denver.
| btgeekboy wrote:
| 1000/35 for me. Yay DOCSIS.
| fibers wrote:
| why is docsis so slow/asymmetric?
| JimmyAustin wrote:
| My parents connection in Australia is 100/3.
| LynxInLA wrote:
| That's the standard ratio for Spectrum consumer internet.
| The ratio actually gets worse as you increase the upload
| speed. They cap out at 35 Mbps upload even with 940 Mbps
| download.
| mfkp wrote:
| My Comcast gigabit internet is capped at 35Mbit upload as
| well.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| It's pretty common if your last mile technology is old,
| e.g. cable internet coax, or copper phone lines for ADSL.
|
| Most Comcast plans in my area come with 5Mbit/s upload,
| even if the download speed is 15x to 25x that.
| MartinodF wrote:
| Most FTTH connections in Italy are 1000/100 or 1000/300
| Mbit/s. I guess most people wouldn't even notice the
| difference in upload between 100 and 1000 Mbit/s.
| lxgr wrote:
| My connection is 1000/50 - theoretically.
|
| On a good day, that works out to about 100/2, thanks to my
| provider vastly overselling their shitty overcongested
| network as "fiber to the home". (It's just cable.)
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| My connection in Germany is 50/5.
| codyb wrote:
| If you're downloading ten segments from ten different
| uploaders it can all balance out I think.
|
| Bittorrent can be damn quick. Haven't used it in a while but
| it was certainly fast on well seeded items.
| TrickyRick wrote:
| Doesn't really matter though, still means (Slightly
| oversimplified) that a peer can connect to 10 hosts and not
| have to download at all from the origin server. Also this
| simply isn't true in a lot of European countries where upload
| and download speeds are equal, but that's a different thing.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| Can you explain what you mean by that last statement? It
| does not sound true to me. As far as I can tell (in my
| country) almost all consumer offers are asymmetric: ADSL,
| obviously, but also fiber. Symmetric offers are very much
| for professional access, and typically more expensive.
| lxgr wrote:
| The math still does not work out.
|
| On an 1:10 asymmetric connection, users would need to
| remain available for seeding 10 times longer than it takes
| to download (and presumably watch) the film to have a net
| positive impact on the system.
|
| That's not exactly realistic, considering that a lot of
| traffic goes to mobile devices where this would outright
| kill battery life.
| codyb wrote:
| Wasn't Netflix originally p2p in some manner? I can't remember
| the exact details (and I may be wrong), but I could have sworn
| their original architecture was distributed in one way or the
| other.
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| You might be thinking about Spotify, which had a torrent-like
| technology originally. Nowadays I think it's fairly limited.
| TrickyRick wrote:
| Also Voddler I guess?
| codyb wrote:
| Thanks that might be right!
| tehsauce wrote:
| This is called a CDN, and they are very ubiquitous especially
| for video streaming services
| knicholes wrote:
| It sounds like it's time for some popcorn.
| kislotnik wrote:
| Excuse me, but if the problem is in overloading of local
| networks, popcorning full-quality vs streaming downsampled
| might revert their efforts in cutting traffic, which might be
| for a good reason.
| orcasauce wrote:
| Would you be so kind to pass some to me? Popcorn that is.
| knicholes wrote:
| I would never risk suggesting people use the legal app
| popcorntime to pirate copyrighted material.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| At least in the US, Netflix colocates a box with the most
| popular content on premises with the ISP, so the last mile
| could be the bottleneck here.
| ivnubinas wrote:
| Yes, it's the same here (Dominican Republic).
| orcasauce wrote:
| As I understand it Netflix has hardware in ISP data centers to
| do exactly that. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
| cosmodisk wrote:
| That's quite something when a streaming service can go to the
| ISP with their hardware...
| spyspy wrote:
| This is common for any company that operates a CDN. It just
| so happens Netflix is a big enough content deliverer that
| they run their own network rather than pay to use someone
| else's.
| megablast wrote:
| Pretty common.
| capableweb wrote:
| Netflix might have data centers that gets closer, but nothing
| will ever get as far reaching and close as P2P would. A
| residential building who are all watching the same movie
| would only have to download the movie from building <>
| internet once. Replicate this system on every level (local
| network <> building <> city <> country) and you get so much
| more bandwidth available.
|
| Of course there are other considerations and we (humans)
| haven't worked as much on P2P as centralized systems, so only
| the future can tell us where the limit is.
| newsclues wrote:
| Large residential buildings (condo and apartments) need a
| small edge Data Centre in them.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| BBC: It is not clear if this applies to the special snow flakes
| on the island off of Europe.
|
| Netflix: You're Europeans again, England. Suck it.
|
| Scotland: Ha ha.
| joshuahughes wrote:
| Actually, we've never NOT been Europeans, and we've never NOT
| been in Europe. Europe's just a continent
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe).
|
| However, we did recently leave the European Union. (See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union.) Completely
| different thing, but very commonly confused.
| cowmix wrote:
| When I had my Internet from Cox here in Phoenix and they started
| to invoke data caps, I was forced to rate limit my TVs here in
| the house.
|
| I have to say, Netflix does a GREAT job making sure their content
| works well under lower bitrates as compared to HULU and Amazon
| Prime.
|
| I was getting pretty good 1080 quality at 2.5mbs. If I didn't do
| the caps, Netflix (and other services) will stream as fast as
| they can.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| I have Cox in Rhode Island, ostensibly 150 mbps but meanwhile
| my TV buffers on simple medium quality content. I am wondering
| if the apartment building's connection isn't prepared for so
| many streamers?
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Makes you think, how much further we could stretch things if we
| were all using the Nims/C/C++ of the world instead of the Ruby's.
|
| Please don't immediately flame, I'm just saying objectively, we
| could stretch hardware out much further. What do you guys think
| about this?
| [deleted]
| NortySpock wrote:
| It's always been a trade-off of engineering time to improve
| performance vs shipping new features.
|
| That said, I have been enjoying maxing out my Raspberry Pi to
| see what I can get it to do. (File server, PiHole so far,
| transcoding audio files so far...)
|
| Looking forward to writing some node.js servers for it to see
| what it can support.
| Qasaur wrote:
| I strongly subscribe to this view. Opinions like this get
| dismissed by the usual premature optimisation argument and that
| engineer-time is expensive, but I think that if we built our
| stacks with performance and efficiency in mind a significant
| chunk of operating and indeed development costs would be
| eliminated from corporate expenditures and would outweigh the
| potential initial development costs (which I don't think is
| that much of an issue, especially when you have competent and
| skilled engineers building said software).
| saagarjha wrote:
| Networking stacks tend to be fairly optimized already.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I don't think C++ generates more efficient packets than
| Ruby.....
| jjgreen wrote:
| In fact they are more efficient, but not as elegant.
| DontGiveTwoFlux wrote:
| I have to imagine that this is to mitigate problems with
| bandwidth intensive low level networking equipment that is
| performance sensitive, not application level code. That
| equipment typically runs code in the languages you mentioned.
| ficklepickle wrote:
| I mean, there is always the productivity trade off. If
| hardware/bandwidth is cheaper than dev time... I guess that was
| the idea with Go, to be productive to write and more efficient
| to run than the dynamic languages.
|
| I think incentives in commercial software are out of whack.
| It's often more profitable to make garbage software that is
| barely fit for purpose. But that same critique also applies to
| much of our economic system.
|
| If we want a particular outcome, the incentives need to be
| aligned accordingly.
| bradstewart wrote:
| This about network bandwidth capacity, not server hardware
| load. Netflix is going to send the same bytes over the network
| regardless of what language it's using for the server code.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Sounds like an ISP bandwidth issue, the bottleneck is the
| network not the cpu.
| bluedino wrote:
| I'm curios to what load the cellular networks are seeing
| chacha2 wrote:
| Anyone know where that remote is from in the picture?
| admax88q wrote:
| Such a shame that multicast never took off.
|
| Would save tremendous amounts of bandwidth in times like this.
| basilgohar wrote:
| This may work when a live stream is being watched at many
| locations from a single or few sources, but in the case of
| video on demand, the utility of multicast would be very limited
| - maybe some folks would coincidentally request the same
| packets at the same time, but the chance of that should be
| vanishingly low.
| Izmaki wrote:
| Are they gonna cut my bill also? I would hate to pay for a
| service i a, not getting (4k streaming)
| echelon wrote:
| > Are they gonna cut my bill also? I would hate to pay for a
| service i a, not getting (4k streaming)
|
| In a desperate time of need, 4k streaming isn't really all that
| important.
|
| I imagine you can make that change to your account yourself.
| Whether Netflix will prorate this for everyone automatically
| remains to be seen.
| rb808 wrote:
| Had my first Netflix problem today at 5pm. Has always been solid
| before today. Other streaming services were good (though YouTube
| searching etc looked loaded)
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