There has to be code in place for people switching to cheaper plans. It can’t be that much effort to switch everyone to a cheaper plan. Especially for a huge company like Netflix.
> Spend time and attention on things that matter
Like what? Just because there’s a pandemic doesn’t mean every single person in this world suddenly has tons of important stuff to do.
Some people do. Most don’t. For most people, “things that matter” in the context of this pandemic doesn’t go beyond washing your hands and avoiding social contact.
What do you imagine the opportunity cost of a couple Netflix devs moving people to a cheaper plan to be? Millions of deaths? Ridiculous.
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.
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.
Right now apparently they're treating us a lot better than the European isps. Outside the HN bubble no one is really surprised to hear about a service quality problem in Europe though.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The idea of many small claims "waking up" a company is nice in theory, but not reality. In reality, the entity being sued asks the courts to consolidate them into a class action, that's part of why class actions exist, because it makes very little sense to have to play out the same legal case a dozen or a hundred etc. times around the country.
I'm sure a law firm somewhere is already looking to form that "class" and rake in their % of a settlement, and I'm sure Netflix understands that and has factored it into their plans, so it's all a moot point except that at some point in the next 3-7 years you'll get a $5 service credit. Maybe.
Also, most contracts have a "force majeur" clause that would cover this sort of thing. And even if it didn't, if enough businesses start having to modify or breach service agreements in these ways through a world-wide crisis then governments will step in and legislate them out of liability. There won't be too much sympathy for the "victims" of Netflix either. Not from the public at large, especially those who lose friends or family to the pandemic, over someone's pixelated experience of End Game or The Office. I know people who are sick, one closely, and I don't know if they're going to survive. Suffering through SD quality (or worse!) isn't what I concern myself with at the moment.
Many people here aren't in America either, but from the American perspective:
You have a right to demand partial refunds for service outages. I once spent several hours of my life getting a <$5 credit from Comcast for a day-long outage.
They sent a tech over to install a new router and I enjoyed faster, uninterrupted service for the remainder of my tenancy, so I count it time well spent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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?
Does it matter? If a company is told to stop selling a service by any other governmental organization (e.g. due to privacy or health concerns), they also should stop charging the subscription.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Akamai has hundrads of cache boxes at German ISPs, including at this one.
There are some issues at play here:
1. This ISP in particular has extremely weird peering rules, they only do paid private peering (more expensive than other transit providers) and even deny access to Tier 1 networks. For a long time YouTube was almost unusable due to weird routing - they even had a website explaining why YouTube was broken (Google doesn't want to pay crycry). Same with several popular gameservers. Due to their market position they are completely fine with being the bully.
2. They have their own streaming and TV offer so they don't have many reasons for making the Netflix experience better.
This information might be outdated, I don't live in Germany anymore and it seems that they now have some sort of partnership with Netflix.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 not true to say that A&A don't oversubscribe. Instead the situation is that they're happy to buy more capacity to fulfil their offer, within reason.
If A&A subscribers could in theory move 10Tbps (if they all simultaneously did some sort of download from a hypothetical unlimited source) but in reality they never do and it peaks at something like 100Gbps, A&A are fulfilling their promise by ensuring they've got 100Gbps to do that.
Typically you'll never notice the difference, except on your bill, because if they had 100x more bandwidth upstream they'd pay a lot of money for that, even though it was unused and they'd have to pass that to you in the medium term.
However, the reality is a little closer to oversubscribing. Suppose A&A are paying for 10Gbps on a particular port somewhere, and at their busiest time of the week it typically runs at 9.8Gbps. Unfortunately the company selling it only wants to offer 100Gbps as the next step up, for five times the money. Another 10Gbps port isn't an option as there are no 10Gbps ports free. So A&A decides to sit on the problem, nobody is suffering at 9.8Gbps.
Next week it hits 10Gbps and seems likely it'd have gone to 11Gbps if that was possible. Oops. The firm they're buying that capacity from still has 100Gbps available, but they agree at last that they could add more 10Gbps ports, and will do so for the same price as the existing port. Unfortunately it means buying a new Cisco router, which Cisc says is on back order, it'll arrive in July.
Are A&A going to throw five times the money at the problem for this burst of maybe 30-40 minutes per week? Or are they going to tell you sorry but it'll be July and until then bandwidth at that peak across that particular link isn't what it ought to be? They're going to do the latter. Because at the end of the day it's a business. RevK is a good guy, but he's not looking to bankrupt the company to make some point.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sweden. Has I lived in an apartment in town it would probably have been 5-10 dollars less depending on where I lived. The city operates its own net with very low costs for large parts of the city
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
The main thing is being able to handle transcoding for certain clients that need it. I’ve got it in Docker on an oldish workstation I bought for like $100 on eBay and threw an SSD in for the OS, but that thing’s surely serious overkill. If you’re only streaming to one or two clients at a time, being on a wired network and having hardware support for any codecs you’ll be dealing with are probably the most important factors.
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..
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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
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"
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.
There are definitely somes issues here. Upload and download speed have gone down since last week, and everyone in the (virtual) office has problems with MS and AWS from time to time. And schools have hardly started...
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
You're technially right but conceptually he did show that the bitrate isn't in the normal 4k ballpark.
There's likely little or no benefit on using a 4k resolution at this bitrate.
In his experiment the Chroomecast on wifi gets a ~6 Mbps stream for 4k, which is about 20% of an average quality Handbrake encoded 4k stream. The surprise was that in his experiment Apple TV got so much higher bitrate. Market segmentation?
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?
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.
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.
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
Exactly, I am not anymore. I wouldn't be at all if I knew it. I'm not watching much and most of the time it's Star Trek TNG or similarly aged stuff, so I didn't realize this might be the case. The girlfriend watches (way) more.
They have only been lying about this since the beginning and never stopped. So has Spotify.
Were you also paying for gold-plated HDMI with built-in virus scanner?
I thought people were voluntarily buying in to this bullshit, because they feel the obligation to financially support the content industry. I mean that's what everybody who thinks this is important is going on about all the time. None of them are seriously arguing you actually get a good deal out of it.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not that I'm aware of. The only high FPS movie I know of is Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ang Lee, it is shot at 120fps. The Hobbit is shot at 48fps.
Interpolation and frame rate are two different things.
Care to give an argument more than ‘looks garbage’? I think people reported that the hobbit looked weird, but that’s likely because were used to 30fps in a subconscious level.
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...
Unlike streaming services, there is a vibrant competitive landscape in the piracy scene with strong competition incentives on technical quality, with reputation being the commodity.
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.
When people say everything is on Spotify, they really mean that everything they know which is Spotify, is on Spotify.
Half the stuff I recommend to people is not on Spotify or Youtube. Thank goodness I had the "entitlement" to build a giant mp3 collection because I have no idea where I'd find it otherwise.
I decided to do that as well, and the fact that artists get literal pennies from Spotify made me completely apathetic towards piracy. I support artists I like through merch and concerts, which is where they make money nowadays.
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).
more like redefining what people think is "all music"
Also sharing mp3s was sharing our full fucking musical culture with each other. We had WHAT.CD. You could make mixtapes. Copyright vultures destroyed ALL of this and put shit like Spotify in the middle of it, making it the arbiter of what is and is not part of this shared culture. Controlling HOW it is shared, what you can do with it and preventing it from being shared with people not in the paying Spotify club.
The things they did to our shared culture, in the name of "stopping privacy" has cost us SO fucking much.
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
> Also, for 5.1 surround sound, no browser will do, you must use the Windows 10 app.
Yep, and when you have done that don‘t forget to manually guess and set your video output refresh rate because the Netflix can‘t be bothered to switch and match the output to the frame rate of the content. For movies it’s very likely 24p and you don‘t want to have that interpolated to 60 Hz.
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™ 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.
This is a joke. They charge me for "Full HD" and don't deliver it? I just downgraded to the cheaper plan with lower definition. If that's what I'm getting, anyway...
I'm not a lawyer, but this sounds like valid grounds for a class-action lawsuit.
Their advertising touts their 4K streaming and HDR quality, but then in practice they silently downgrade most non-television devices to HD resolutions and SDR. There's a footnote in some tech support article if you know where to look, that's it.
Under Australian consumer protection law, for example, this kind of deceptive or false advertising is flat-out illegal, and comes with eye-watering fines. Telecommunications companies have had huge fines for saying their Internet is "broadband" when it wasn't qualifying, for example.
If it wasn't such an enormous pain in the arse, I would love to get the ball rolling on a lawsuit, because flagrantly anti-consumer behaviour like this needs to stop.
Look at this this way: If you ask NetFlix about why they insist on DRM, particularly when most of their content is available in glorious 4K on certain pirate-themed bays, they mumble some excuse about contracts with their content providers. However, a huge chunk of their content is made by Netflix!
That's like a self-employed person saying "Sorry, this is company policy. My boss told me I have to do this nonsensical bad thing."
> 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.
This is a Windows 10 bug. Even things like mouse movement in the 60Hz will make the 144Hz stutter. It's especially noticeable in games.
> 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.
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.
The resolution on Netflix is not a useful indicator of anything (other than an upper bound on image quality). The "1080" Netflix for me usually looks nothing like the average FHD encode of a movie through other channels. A Netflix "4k" stream downscaled to 1080p would probably be closer to normal FHD encode quality.
This is not really surprising as most of the audience is very insensitive to quality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not just that. Eyeball network ISPs also shake down companies like Netflix with extortionate fees when peering points are overloaded to upgrade the connection.
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.
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?
You will still get 4k resolution. Just at 25% less bitrate. But since the thing that's necessary to fulfill your contract is the number of pixels, which have not changed, you are out of luck, unless you find some clause in your contract with Netflix that guarantees a certain bitrate.
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.
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?
"European Commissioner Thierry Breton, who is responsible for the EU internal market covering more than 450 million people, spoke to Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings on Wednesday and again on Thursday about the strain video streaming was placing on networks."
Apparently the EU thinks it's a problem.
The truth is that this will probably make little difference, but it makes sense for Netflix to do this since it doesn't cost them anything and now they are owed a favor by a regulator.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 388 ms ] threadCOVID-19 requires spending time and effort on lots of things.
Everything has an opportunity cost.
Spend time and attention on things that matter.
Doesn’t seem that often or that excessive.
> Spend time and attention on things that matter
Like what? Just because there’s a pandemic doesn’t mean every single person in this world suddenly has tons of important stuff to do.
Some people do. Most don’t. For most people, “things that matter” in the context of this pandemic doesn’t go beyond washing your hands and avoiding social contact.
What do you imagine the opportunity cost of a couple Netflix devs moving people to a cheaper plan to be? Millions of deaths? Ridiculous.
I also disagree that there's an uniform service quality problem, there really isn't. Such a blanket change is simply stupid.
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.
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...
https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
I'm sure a law firm somewhere is already looking to form that "class" and rake in their % of a settlement, and I'm sure Netflix understands that and has factored it into their plans, so it's all a moot point except that at some point in the next 3-7 years you'll get a $5 service credit. Maybe.
Also, most contracts have a "force majeur" clause that would cover this sort of thing. And even if it didn't, if enough businesses start having to modify or breach service agreements in these ways through a world-wide crisis then governments will step in and legislate them out of liability. There won't be too much sympathy for the "victims" of Netflix either. Not from the public at large, especially those who lose friends or family to the pandemic, over someone's pixelated experience of End Game or The Office. I know people who are sick, one closely, and I don't know if they're going to survive. Suffering through SD quality (or worse!) isn't what I concern myself with at the moment.
The "Europe" qualifier seemed necessary as many people on here aren't in Europe.
You have a right to demand partial refunds for service outages. I once spent several hours of my life getting a <$5 credit from Comcast for a day-long outage.
They sent a tech over to install a new router and I enjoyed faster, uninterrupted service for the remainder of my tenancy, so I count it time well spent.
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.
My point is, you’re saying nobody would notice the quality difference if Netflix lowered their quality. I think I would notice a bit.
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.
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?
They did not force Netflix to do it. Rather, they asked them.
Is it them, or is it overselling by ISPs?
4 euro a month (or 33% increase).
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.de-cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statis...
Then you go to Germany and it's mass of DSL (and some areas cable). I wonder what happened or why?
- 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#Re-unifi...
There are some issues at play here:
1. This ISP in particular has extremely weird peering rules, they only do paid private peering (more expensive than other transit providers) and even deny access to Tier 1 networks. For a long time YouTube was almost unusable due to weird routing - they even had a website explaining why YouTube was broken (Google doesn't want to pay crycry). Same with several popular gameservers. Due to their market position they are completely fine with being the bully.
2. They have their own streaming and TV offer so they don't have many reasons for making the Netflix experience better.
This information might be outdated, I don't live in Germany anymore and it seems that they now have some sort of partnership with Netflix.
https://www.golem.de/news/internet-traffic-de-cix-sieht-kein...
Don't know about any ISPs that do this.
[1] https://www.nix.no/statistics/
The ISPs oversubscribed, and can't deal with this many people being at home all at once.
"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
It's a far cry from the 50:1 IPStream product.
If A&A subscribers could in theory move 10Tbps (if they all simultaneously did some sort of download from a hypothetical unlimited source) but in reality they never do and it peaks at something like 100Gbps, A&A are fulfilling their promise by ensuring they've got 100Gbps to do that.
Typically you'll never notice the difference, except on your bill, because if they had 100x more bandwidth upstream they'd pay a lot of money for that, even though it was unused and they'd have to pass that to you in the medium term.
However, the reality is a little closer to oversubscribing. Suppose A&A are paying for 10Gbps on a particular port somewhere, and at their busiest time of the week it typically runs at 9.8Gbps. Unfortunately the company selling it only wants to offer 100Gbps as the next step up, for five times the money. Another 10Gbps port isn't an option as there are no 10Gbps ports free. So A&A decides to sit on the problem, nobody is suffering at 9.8Gbps.
Next week it hits 10Gbps and seems likely it'd have gone to 11Gbps if that was possible. Oops. The firm they're buying that capacity from still has 100Gbps available, but they agree at last that they could add more 10Gbps ports, and will do so for the same price as the existing port. Unfortunately it means buying a new Cisco router, which Cisc says is on back order, it'll arrive in July.
Are A&A going to throw five times the money at the problem for this burst of maybe 30-40 minutes per week? Or are they going to tell you sorry but it'll be July and until then bandwidth at that peak across that particular link isn't what it ought to be? They're going to do the latter. Because at the end of the day it's a business. RevK is a good guy, but he's not looking to bankrupt the company to make some point.
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.
> 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.
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22627764
Likely some ISPs see themselves as offering more valuable traffic than their competitors striving to peer.
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.
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
The US doesn't have many significant neutral exchanges, but here's one: https://www.seattleix.net/statistics/
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.
Also, there are very large parts of California that are rural.
That's about 5%, which is pretty low.
on the other hand the web is filled with horror stories emanating from C....st customers.
Rural America seems to be an entirely different story.
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...
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.
I'd still do the tower and resell b/w to recoup some of the costs.
I'm not holding my breath.
Or even just a separate pipe for either Ethernet or Fibre Cables.
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_Internet_...
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)
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...
Edit: same for 2018 as well: https://www.statista.com/statistics/956188/monthly-mobile-da...
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.
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.
One of them shows a ping of 27 ms (I think it's normally ~ 10 ms)
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.
Maybe we're far behind the rest of Europe but as we are part of Europe, then it isn't that great 'literally everywhere'.
Kodi on an Rpi makes a good cast target for it, though.
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..
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.
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.
As in this puts too much stress and thus too high of a cost on their end.
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...
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.
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?
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.
You get 10TB of bandwidth for a dollar. Once average usage per subscriber goes over that, then we can talk.
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.
Why? It works for electricity.
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.)
Please don't immediately flame, I'm just saying objectively, we could stretch hardware out much further. What do you guys think about this?
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.
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.
https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669234
On computers you can access some debug stats https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2fkylx/hidden_netf... and Roku also has it https://community.roku.com/t5/Channel-Issues-Questions/Someh...
There's likely little or no benefit on using a 4k resolution at this bitrate.
In his experiment the Chroomecast on wifi gets a ~6 Mbps stream for 4k, which is about 20% of an average quality Handbrake encoded 4k stream. The surprise was that in his experiment Apple TV got so much higher bitrate. Market segmentation?
https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2019/02/14/adventures-in-netfli...
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.
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
(I'm just saying, because apparently there were people unaware they are paying to get screwed from all sides at once)
They have only been lying about this since the beginning and never stopped. So has Spotify.
Were you also paying for gold-plated HDMI with built-in virus scanner?
I thought people were voluntarily buying in to this bullshit, because they feel the obligation to financially support the content industry. I mean that's what everybody who thinks this is important is going on about all the time. None of them are seriously arguing you actually get a good deal out of it.
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.
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.
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).
I believe their licence terms are also the reason you can download some Netflix videos to your phone/Windows 10 machine, but not others.
I mean if you download it once, you have it.
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.
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.
You can also find uncompressed 60-70GB UHD rips.
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.
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.
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.
That's why moviemakers beg audiences not to do frame interpolation.
Care to give an argument more than ‘looks garbage’? I think people reported that the hobbit looked weird, but that’s likely because were used to 30fps in a subconscious level.
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).
Pirated content from other people that lies about what it is isn't unheard of, though.
It's like the oppressive DRM that hurts actual paying customers of games rather than the pirates who circumvent it.
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.
Half the stuff I recommend to people is not on Spotify or Youtube. Thank goodness I had the "entitlement" to build a giant mp3 collection because I have no idea where I'd find it otherwise.
more like redefining what people think is "all music"
Also sharing mp3s was sharing our full fucking musical culture with each other. We had WHAT.CD. You could make mixtapes. Copyright vultures destroyed ALL of this and put shit like Spotify in the middle of it, making it the arbiter of what is and is not part of this shared culture. Controlling HOW it is shared, what you can do with it and preventing it from being shared with people not in the paying Spotify club.
The things they did to our shared culture, in the name of "stopping privacy" has cost us SO fucking much.
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?
Yep, and when you have done that don‘t forget to manually guess and set your video output refresh rate because the Netflix can‘t be bothered to switch and match the output to the frame rate of the content. For movies it’s very likely 24p and you don‘t want to have that interpolated to 60 Hz.
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.
Ask B&H folks. They always have them.
I mean how is this even legal?
After diligent conditioning by Netflix, I've come to enjoy 720p, apparently. On the plus side it means I can pay them less.
Their advertising touts their 4K streaming and HDR quality, but then in practice they silently downgrade most non-television devices to HD resolutions and SDR. There's a footnote in some tech support article if you know where to look, that's it.
Under Australian consumer protection law, for example, this kind of deceptive or false advertising is flat-out illegal, and comes with eye-watering fines. Telecommunications companies have had huge fines for saying their Internet is "broadband" when it wasn't qualifying, for example.
If it wasn't such an enormous pain in the arse, I would love to get the ball rolling on a lawsuit, because flagrantly anti-consumer behaviour like this needs to stop.
Look at this this way: If you ask NetFlix about why they insist on DRM, particularly when most of their content is available in glorious 4K on certain pirate-themed bays, they mumble some excuse about contracts with their content providers. However, a huge chunk of their content is made by Netflix!
That's like a self-employed person saying "Sorry, this is company policy. My boss told me I have to do this nonsensical bad thing."
It's just absurd.
You're going to sue Netflix for maybe $1 in damages per user?
This is a Windows 10 bug. Even things like mouse movement in the 60Hz will make the 144Hz stutter. It's especially noticeable in games.
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.
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.
This is not really surprising as most of the audience is very insensitive to 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.
I wish I lived in this blissful world.
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.
Netflix: You're Europeans again, England. Suck it.
Scotland: Ha ha.
However, we did recently leave the European Union. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union.) Completely different thing, but very commonly confused.
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.
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.
Would save tremendous amounts of bandwidth in times like this.
> 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.
YouTube is unfazed.
Also it would be the first time that a U.S net company does something voluntarily just by kindly asking.
"European Commissioner Thierry Breton, who is responsible for the EU internal market covering more than 450 million people, spoke to Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings on Wednesday and again on Thursday about the strain video streaming was placing on networks."
Apparently the EU thinks it's a problem.
The truth is that this will probably make little difference, but it makes sense for Netflix to do this since it doesn't cost them anything and now they are owed a favor by a regulator.