[paulgpetty]

It might not seem like this is a big deal. For now that’s probably right; but Netflix has aspirations to do nightly news and if that’s intended to be live or near real-time we should be comparing their uptime with broadcast TV. When was the last time ABC or Fox went off air?

Again, not right now, but at some point this sort of outage becomes critical and will probably deserve more scrutiny.

I’m impressed by how reliable Netflix is, hopefully this just pushes them harder.

And maybe even prepares them for a less neutral internet.

[Retric]

Depends on what you're measuring.

Local stations regularly go off air. Sure, some stations outside the range of your antenna might work but effectively their just down. For national events they will fail over to the local stations and keep broadcasting, but if the content is not there they are just down.

[Scarbutt]

That's like blaming Netflix when your local ISP is down.

[unfunco]

Do you have a citation for the nightly news aspirations? Whenever I read about Netflix not wanting to purchase the rights to soccer, it's nearly always with the reason being that Netflix has little to no interest in live streaming:

https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/07/netflix-ceo-reed-hasting...

_"We have so much we want to do in our area, so we're not trying to copy others, whether that's linear cable, there's lots of things we don't do. We don't do [live] news, we don't do [live] sports. But what we do do, we try to do really well."_ - Reed Hastings.

[dopamean]

They already have shows that run a bit like that. I believe Michelle Wolff's show is one of them.

[unfunco]

The Break is pre-recorded and released weekly with a quick turnaround time (hours maybe), but it's not at all live.

[dopamean]

You're right. This might sound weird but it's been so long since I've watched nightly news that I actually forgot that it's live.

[satsuma]

joel mchale's show was weekly too. i'm no television expert so i don't know how much more it would take to get a daily show rolling.

[tjoff]

How is nightly news critical? Worst case, watch it 20 minutes later instead?

[markbnj]

Or you've already read the details of every story on the net hours earlier.

[r00fus]

It's not mission critical except for stickiness/adherence.

Arguably it could be used as a guaranteed self-marketing platform (in the intimate/most core sense - you can't watch if you don't have Netflix so people will just think of it as NetflixNews).

[AckSyn]

Believe it or not, a lot of people still use local tv/news for entertainment or information (of local news).

(Near) realtime would be important for emergencies, as rare as they are.

[tjoff]

I'm not questioning that and it doesn't imply that an outage would be a critical event.

Yes it would be embarrassing and it would be an inconvenience, but nothing worse than what happened today.

[e40]

My dad has directv and they regularly have issues. He wasn't able to get NBA games for weeks, due to some software glitch (the entire channel was unavailable to him, for unknown reasons).

[chejazi]

Directv is a distributor, not a producer, so the stakes aren't as high.

[49bc]

That’s a distinction the average person wouldn’t make.

[chejazi]

But it has the potential to affect more people. Cable providers can be regional, tv productions national/international.

[laumars]

> When was the last time ABC or Fox went off air?

Broadcasting TV and Netflix are a very different payment model though. Broadcasting get their money from adverts. So even a couple of minutes of outage could cost them tens of thousands in terms of compensating sponsors for lost ads (depending on when the outage is as not all ad slots are worth the same). Where as Netflix is a subscription model where an outage is an inconvenience to their customers but they're not directly losing money (aside engineers overtime fees etc). Obviously Netflix could potentially lose customers but that's not going to be at a high rate from a single outage like this.

This distinction is can change dynamic of how you build broadcasting infrastructure. eg redundancy equipment is typical in any high availability deployment but broadcasting will not only have redundant physical equipment in different physical locations, but will often also have a second set of redundant hardware in each location purchased from different suppliers and running different software just in case it is a software / hardware malfunction specific to the product. Whereas in internet streaming services the emphasis is more on standardising software stacks to aid scaling - which makes total sense in terms of cloud services but that does still give you a potential point of failure (eg poorly tested Puppet or Terraform code getting deployed to prod).

Local US stations might not have the same level of redundancy as their national counterparts, but like the distinction between Netflix and traditional broadcasting if a financial one, equally the difference between ad revenue for local vs national broadcasters would be massively different. Ultimately the more costly it is for your service to be off the air, the most you'd expect to invest into your infrastructure to ensure you don't have any such outages.

[ProAm]

> Netflix has aspirations to do nightly news

I hope not, that has echos of Yahoo. It's bad enough their streaming library is so thin, I'd rather see more content there than create their own new line of content.

[HenryTheHorse]

> I'd rather see more content there than create their own new line of content.

Their content strategy (and Amazon's) seems to be evolving toward developing their own content library, much like HBO. In theory, it frees Netflix of over-dependence on networks and studios. In practice, we get crappy shows and standup specials.

[EtienneK]

I disagree wholeheartedly. Sure, there will be low quality shows. This expected by the sheer amount of content they are currently producing. But there are equal amounts of good to very good shows also getting released at a pace that a normal working person just can’t keep up with.

My watch-list just keeps growing. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to catch up.

[cmlndz]

Licensing content it’s their biggest cost so yes, that’s their (probably correct) strategy. But instead of ‘crappy’ I believe the right terms is ‘long tail’. Make something for everyone since relative producing costs are minimal vs buying that content and distribution costs are almost zero for low-viewing content.

[moltar]

I think it’s probably to win over the last bit of TV people who claim “but where I’ll get my news if I cut the cable?”

[cgriswald]

I think the last TV people are the ones who claim, "Cable is my only option for internet, and the way it is bundled, I might as well get cable TV too."

[willyt]

Doesn't seem to be all that reliable or is it just me? I have it on a fire stick and it regularly stalls at 20%, the only reliable way to get it going again is to reboot the whole stick. About once every two weeks the cache gets corrupted and I have to clear it and login again. Both a total PITA when you are just trying to squeeze an episode of something in between kids bedtime and grownup bedtime...

[rootusrootus]

That sounds like the difference between Netflix-the-service and Netflix-the-app. Maybe ditch the Fire stick and get something more reliable?

[Pharaoh2]

That just the fire stick, or the netflix firestick app or your network. That isn't netflix's infrastructure problem. Netflix is the most reliable of netflix/hulu/hbo.

Try a higher end streaming devices that wired to your router

[SmellyGeekBoy]

I find the Fire Stick generally pretty awful. No problems at all since I switched to Nvidia Shield.

[myrandomcomment]

Just you. In my family we have it on 3 TVs as built in application (2 of the same, and 1 diff) and on th iPads and pretty much never have any issues.

[ouid]

Uptime on broadcast is different because it's not on demand. The reason people use Netflix is because on demand is better than broadcast, because broadcast has implicit uptime issues. Anytime that I cannot watch something on broadcast television is downtime, not only that, but it is unrecoverable downtime. There is no comparison to a service whose downtime functionally compares to the latter's "commercial break.

[joevandyk]

https://downdetector.com/status/fox-news/news/216662-problem...