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by EthanHeilman 2754 days ago
>Netflix found a way to solve the actual problems that people were having and at the end of the day the underlying technology didn't matter.

This, one thousand times this, it is always this. People have problems and they want solutions, they don't care about particular technology architectures.
2 comments
CuriousSkeptic 2754 days ago
To be fair p2p was, and still is, a better technical solution, and had it not been illegal, would probably have won.

(p2p wasn’t illegal, but what people wanted out of it was)

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kabdib 2754 days ago
There are services that incorporate P2P (e.g., Spotify, and you can find others if you do some research). If you're writing closed-source software that operates on content that belongs to you (or that you've legally licensed) there's nothing preventing you from using peer-to-peer technologies in your stuff.

I can't believe that Netflix didn't seriously consider P2P. I imagine they didn't do it because there are issues with consuming limited upload bandwidth that doesn't belong to NF, and having poor control over the resulting complicated network flows and the ultimate customer experience (think about what your first customer service action for a customer having video quality issues would be).

No doubt there are many managers and system engineers who shy away from P2P because it's associated with bad actors. But there are sound reliability engineering and customer-facing reasons not to use it, too.

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chrischen 2754 days ago
Didn’t Netflix start providing ISP level caching vis boxes? In any case if they didn’t this method would make P2P pointless as consumer peers would still route traffic back to their ISP, and in worst cases another consumer could be at another ISP network.
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hndamien 2753 days ago
In this case it is a little stranger though. It seems that the problem is that the economic system is rigged against them, and their payment systems are spying on them. When the “solution” to this becomes evident it has been flowing to the participants in that economy. They then realize that Bitcoin was solving their monetary problem all along and the awakening happens - only when they rush to the solution it appears to be a mirage as the very act of them rushing on their realization turns into instant debt liberation for the long term participants. Then it all crumbles and they say it’s a scam and was never a solution. In reality, nothing really changed, and the slow crawl will continue for the long term participants.
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