Slashdot Mirror

Fair use.

Does Canada even have "fair use"? I thought Commonwealth countries such as Canada had "fair dealing", which is noticeably narrower than "fair use". US law allows fair use "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research" (17 USC 107), and the word "such as" is considered "illustrative and not limitative". Fair dealing is similar to fair use except that the listed purposes are the only purposes for which a use is permitted.

nowhere in the Netflix user agreement does it say that in so many words.

From Netflix Terms of Use 6c: "You may view a movie or TV show through the Netflix service [...] only in geographic locations where we offer our service and have licensed such movie or TV show. The content that may be available to watch will vary by geographic location. Netflix will use technologies to verify your geographic location."

Why wait? Complain now: https://contactus.netflix.com/...

Just hope that it can run netflix.

I don't understand why you have been down-modded, but:

The first smart TVs powered by Firefox OS have gone on sale today in Europe. [...] The new Panasonic TVs ship with a decent number of Firefox OS apps, including a Netflix app that supports 4K streaming, [...]

"Sorry, Netflix is not available in your country yet.": Netflix - Greece (that's in Europe... and not just in Europe, but in the European Union also... actually "Europe" IS A FUCKING GREEK NAME!)

That's false, Netflix has software available for Android 2.0 or later:

https://help.netflix.com/en/no...

This may be a glib answer but I don't give two shits about 4K HD. I am not enough of a videophile to discern the difference between 720p and 1080p.

Even if I cared about 4K most codecs I've seen fall in the 15 to 30Mbps range. Netflix claims that you need 25Mbps. A 100Mbps connection is certainly ample.

Huh? Netflix says it needs 25 Mbs I'm not sure where you're getting 1.5 Mb/s-- unless you like 360p.

They already have started doing that...to mixed results. See: Arrested Development season 4.

But yes, resurrecting shows that were mishandled to begin with is a great way to attract people to their medium, especially since once you get them there, they're likely to get hooked on the low price and massive amount of content that can fill idle time (of course, if you're looking for something specific that's newer, you're probably better served with a rental service like Amazon or iTunes). I was a Netflix user before the original content started, and it's been a nice bonus, since as they branch out more with it, they hit more and more areas of interest for me. House of Cards was up my alley, and Daredevil is one that I'll definitely be taking a look at.

Check out this movie:

http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie...

Gives an interesting inside look at Markerbot and its main competition at the time.

Due to the use of a less than sign, some of my message got eaten.

when I request (less than) 7 mbit of traffic (according to https://help.netflix.com/en/no...), Verizon shouldn't be crying foul for it.

Like they offer to do?

https://openconnect.itp.netfli...

hit and miss [...] streaming video on netflix

Believe it or not, this is actually a setting in your Netflix options which defaults to "Auto." I had some flaky playback until I told it to use as much as possible, now it's HD all the time.

Of the estimated 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, only one in 10 can support complex life like that on Earth

10 percent of 100 billion is still 10 billion galaxies. That's a lot of real estate. Even if you apply all the other characteristics that give rocky planets in the habitable zone of their star billions of years to evolve life. There are features like having a Jupiter in a circular orbit instead of an elliptical orbit or a moon that creates tide pools. That's a lot of habitable planets and a lot of potential for intelligent life.

Netflix has a really interesting series narrated by Laird Close called Life In Our Universe that covers the topic in great detail.

If Netflix wanted to rent colocation space at Comcast's going rate but Comcast refused, I'd love to see a citation for this.

Netflix also offer interconnects on their own private CDN. Netflix offers what they call "Open Connect". Netflix already has the space, and the data lines, and the caching appliances. Not sure why you think Netflix should pay datacenter "rent" to an ISP for that.

The only difference that buying direct links in meant was that they got to skip the congestion in the peering points. Comcast has alot more bandwidth internally and once traffic makes it into the network, congestion is not usually a problem (things do break, redundant links become saturated, etc. It's a big network, but in normal operation mode, congestion doesn't exist).

That's just it. Comcast didn't need to buy a direct link. Netflix offers a CDN and caching hardware for free to ISPs to help alleviate the peering congestion you're describing. Comcast (and Verizon, TW, etc) refused to accept Netflix's free offer. Instead they had the gall to charge Netflix money before they'd accept it.

except unlike almost every company out there, netflix refuses to pay for CDN hosting and wants to distribute it's content via the tier 1 networks and then whines there isn't enough bandwidth

CNN, yahoo, amazon, HBO, hulu and others pay commercial CDN's to host their content close to the users

Well, not so much.

I'm not doubting or challenging you, but I'm interested in knowing about your 1U 136TB SSD servers. Can you suggest some specs?

The highest-density boxes I get to have some familiarity with are Netflix's OpenConnect caches, described at https://openconnect.itp.netfli... -- where it's mentioned that they fit 36 6TB drives in a 2U chassis, for a total of 216TB, or 108TB/U. You're beating that, and with SSDs, which is ... impressive.

you can parrot this nonsense all you want, but the fact is that every other video provider pays a CDN to get good performance, except netflix who whines about everyone having to pay their bills for them.

Netflix goes even further and will put their own caching servers inside your network at their expense. Guess which ISP decided they'd rather hold their customers hostage for a big fucking check?

Could someone explain why all of this is an issue, when Netflix seems to be giving away their OpenConnect CDN boxes for free, so that ISPs can cache most of the Netflix traffic inside their own network?

Netflix offers several test streams for validating your speeds, and Google has a Video Quality Report

I find that the Speedtest.Net results are a realistic estimate of my actual best case upload/download speed, but there are certainly some websites which are much slower to load, for various reasons. If you suspect your ISP is throttling some websites intentionally, you can always browse through a VPN service.

As mentioned previously, local WiFi problems are often the root cause of slow page loads. Go wired. You can also use the network debugging tools built into Firefox (Network Monitor) and MSIE to try to determine what parts of a page are particularly slow.

When hosting your app in the cloud, regardless of provider, it is considered best practice to design for failure.

Netflix goes so far as to randomly kill services throughout the day. Their idea is that it's better to find systems that aren't auto-healing correctly by testing recovery during routine operations than to be surprised by it at 3AM. It's successful to the point that you generally don't know that the streaming server you were connected to has been killed and a peer took over for it. That is how you make reliable cloud services.

Invert your Fragility training as I thought Anti-Fragile is all the rage now days.

Wrong!

Netflix on Roku has been HD for ages.

I see Roku actually supports both SmoothStreaming (used by netflix) and PlayReady. Good luck trying to get it to work on a typical linux distro though. HD content is DRMed, Roku just supports the DRM.

Wrong!

Netflix on Roku has been HD for ages.

And here I was thinking that you were going to link to this..

THIS is a streaming service.

I see what dun deere.

THIS is a streaming service.

Since I didn't link to it before... Here is the average speed of a given stream to the end user for August 2014 in the US: http://ispspeedindex.netflix.c...

Cablevision tops the list at a meer 3.11 Mbps...
Verizon DSL holds the bottom at 1.31 Mbps...

If you average those it is 2.21 Mbps as the mid point for US streaming speed...

Google numbers are very area specific, or I'd link to those as well.

TFS mentions high quality video. You're not streaming high quality video with 10 or even 20Mbps.

Netflix recommends 5Mbps for HD streaming, so you are wrong.

When I called Netflix for tech support, they recommended 5MBps for HD streaming. However, their FAQ do say 5Mbps for HD streaming. Also note that they call 720p "HD". As we get more devices connected to the network and higher resolutions become standard, we will need more bandwidth.

So?

I used to run a big adult site. We wanted servers closer to the customers for speed. We made enough that we didn't really care about the connection costs. We'd put up server farms around the world where it suited our customers best.

We owned every piece of equipment in our cabinet or cage (depending on the location). The provider equipment ended at the fiber they dropped to us, and the power outlets.

Netflix was hosted with Amazon for a while. A couple years ago, they claimed to have started their own CDN.

Their own CDN site talks about putting Netflix gear out for free. So they are basically saying they want the free ride. No one gets rack space, power, and connections for free. The right thing to do would be to lease the space like everyone else does.

But hey, they're loving to cry about being treated unfairly. They are the loudest ones about it. Honestly, other than speed complaints that are usually a fault, not a conspiracy, I don't know of anyone else talking about the same thing.

It is possible that the world is ganging up on Netflix. It happened to Cogent, more than once. That was mostly they refused to pay on their contractual obligations.

The Netflix boxes are adapted from Backblaze 4U 45 drive storage pods. It is called the Open Connect Hardware Appliance. They are not insignificant and I hear each one is designed to support up to 50,000 end users.

If you have 50,000 people paying you $80 a month and 50% of what they use it for is Netflix, you can afford the power and rack space for one 4U box.

They are dreaming. We are thinking about throttling them here right now. Why should we let all those other sites suffer due to one service using nearly 75% of our bandwidth. Let them fix their busted streaming model to include some caching ability.

Surely you're not talking about Netflix? If you're an ISP, Netflix will peer with you for free at 8 major POPs. They will even give you caching servers to put at your border. If one service is consuming 75% of your transit, someone probably does have a busted model but it isn't Netflix.

You are doing it wrong. Netflix at the highest bit rate is similar to BluRay, and they support 4k which is even better (and yes, the bitrate is adequate). As for downloads proper BluRay rips clock in around 10GB of an average 1.5-2 hour movie.

You don't know what you're talking about. Netflix's "Super HD" 1080p is 7 Mbit/s. A single-layer two-hour BluRay movie can be 18 Mbit/s and still leave room for an hour of extra material. The codecs are the same.

Sure, I don't mind the quality of a 10 GB H.264 BluRay rip; I wouldn't be able to tell the difference compared to the raw BluRay rip... which clocks in at 25 GB or more. But I can certainly tell the difference when I compare with the 6.3 GB Netflix "Super HD" version!

As for 4K, what's the point, when most movies are still mastered in 2K (Full HD)? Iron Man 3, Noah, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, every bloody Transformers movie... they're all mastered in 2K!

Per their help page, HD is 5Mbps, Ultra HD is 25 Mbps.

https://help.netflix.com/en/no...

its total hosrseshit written by a guy that knows nothing of how enterprise networking operates.

heh - the guy is one of the leading experts on computer networking. I notice you don't even have a link to your CV on your user page. Wanna be specific?

They could change their business model tomorrow to one that wasn't crushing the ISP's infrastructure but they have time and again refused to do so.

You mean like offering settlement-free peering and free content caches to ISP's?

    https://www.netflix.com/openco...

C'mon, the ISP's don't want to charge customers for what they're using or let Netflix compete with their video on demand services, and the Tier-2 ISP's don't want to give Netflix settlement-free equal access when they're stuck between a bellicose ISP and Netflix (but are generally willing to give them a lower QoS quality).

Wait, do you work for Verizon?

Amazon's Mechanical Turk
Netflix Tagger

There's a couple that didn't exist a few decades ago, which are currently in the 'too hard to automate' category. They might not remain there forever, but these are arguably not skilled jobs, just normal information processing jobs that most desk jockeys would do well at.

I'm speaking from experience here. I've seen the drop in peak bandwidth before and after deploying these. We spend hundreds of millions a year upgrading our network, so a free box that eases the pain is an easy call to make.
Netflix provides the appliance for free. The space and power costs are pathetically small compared to the benefits in increased quality and decreased expense and capital upgrades.
Also, they didn't offer this only to Comcast. They offer this to every ISP, see the link below.

https://www.netflix.com/openco...

A lot of people seem to be replying to this as if the parent were suggesting client side caching. More likely, the parent is talking about ISP level cache servers, which Netflix provides ISPs free of charge. This drastically reduces the amount of bandwidth being used between the ISP and the Internet. Netflix has actually done a great job with their cache servers, open source hardware design, based loosely on the Backblaze storage pod. Netflix also publishes the exact hardware they use to build them. Very cool move for a big corporation. https://www.netflix.com/openco...

The problem is Netflix refuses to sign reciprocal peering agreements.

What? I work in the industry too, our network has multiple dedicated 10GE peering ports with Netflix in every major IXP where we have a presence.
Netflix is easy to work with on peering because it's very much in their interest not to use Level3, Cogent, or other transit providers at all.
The point about Netflix using transit providers that are relatively more expensive to the ISP on the other end may be valid, but is any ISP with more than a few thousand customers should be peering directly with Netflix anyway.
https://www.netflix.com/openco...

Netflix does have a CDN program. They will provide a caching appliance free of charge to ISPs which will immediately reduce the load on that ISPs network. The only reason not to participate is if the goal is not to provide service and reduce costs, but to artificially choke back Netflix to make the ISPs own video product more competitive. The Open Connect appliance is actually a pretty cool design.
https://www.netflix.com/openco...

Unfortunately thanks to Netflix and Amazon, I'm barely staying within my usage cap with Comcast as it is.

What the hell are you downloading? Raw uncompressed blu-ray images? According to Netflix's usage page, the highest quality streams use HD: 3 GB per hour, 3D: 4.7 GB per hour, Ultra HD 4K: 7 GB per hour.

For a HD stream, it would take you over 80 hours to reach 250GB. 40, 2hr HD movies. Wow. Just Wow. The average American watches 2.8hrs of TV per day. If you download 100% of only HD content from Amazon/Netflix every month you'll be about at the 80+hrs / month of usage. Still a lot of downloading, given that you can't watch live events (sports/news broadcasts). Btw, even the World Cup isn't broadcast in 1080p like on broadcast/cable TV.

The current caps are from 250GB to 350GB depending on your service area. In fact, if you look at your data usage, you'll notice that they've suspended the 250GB cap enforcement.

You do realize that you fall into the .000001% of consumers who should be on a business plan if they want to download 50TB/month.

Remember no business caters to the .0000001% of consumers regardless of their business. You should vote with your dollars, find a provider that will give you unlimited usage with higher bandwidth. I'm sure there's plenty of ISPs that would be willing to drop an OC48 (2.4Gb) into your house for a quite a few grand a month. Or a Comcast business solution that has no cap.

Surely a 150Mbdown 20Mb up with no caps for $250/month is enough for you and your entire family to watch HDs every minute of every day until your eyeballs rot. Just think, with 150Mb/s down you could consume about 65GB/hr, or 20 HD movies per hour 24hrs per day, 7 days per week...

Right tool for the right job. Obviously you want Commercial Services at Residential Pricing and you don't meet the requirements of the typical Residential user, so switch to Commercial Services and be happy.

I agree except that a target of 1Mbps is still way too low. I say 5Mbps should be the basic entry-level speed as it allows Netflix at lower bitrate/SD resolution, which Netflix Canada had to add in order to help Canadian users not bust through their monthly caps.

Sure, it could be a crowded Verizon network, but claiming it's THE cause is speculation, and claiming that there is something Verizon isn't providing is completely wrong.

Well doesn't it seem rather odd then that in a ranking out of 60 ISPs, Verizon DSL comes in dead last?. (hit the include small ISPs button)

Even their Verizon FIOS ranks at 50. How is it that 49 other big and small ISPs come in faster than Verizon's FIOS when most of them probably do not have peering agreements. Seriously, who in the heck is going to pay for Verizon FIOS when it can't even stream Netflix as fast as a small broadband company. Verizon can complain all it wants, but I suspect Netflix has data to back up all their claims.

Verizon is in the wrong from the perspective of their Netflix customers, I agree.

https://www.netflix.com/openco...

Should I also be able to force Netflix to peer with me?
Should every company in my building with "eyes" (customers) be able to force Netflix to peer with them?

I can't defend Verizon's business choice to refuse to address the needs of some large portion of their customer base, but I, as Network Engineer for a smaller ISP, can say with absolute certainty that forcing peering arrangements is ridiculously bad. It's equivalent to forcing a gas station operator to have fittings for every possible form of vehicle gas receptacle, with nothing to standardize it. You *have* to let the market determine these sorts of things, otherwise, we need a new bill in the legislation for every network we feel is important enough to circumvent the freedoms of the market.

AH! I see you are unfamiliar with "How Standards Proliferate".

Netflix provides TOECDN to anyone they just call it Open Connect CDN.

Netflix offers caching but Comcast/Verizon demand they pay for it despite the money they would save by hosting the cache. They're more interested in poaching Netflix's customers for their own streaming alternatives. This is what happens when Net Neutrality is not mandated.

No they don't.
https://www.netflix.com/openco...

Specifically: "The ISP network must be located in or connected to the same peering locations as the Netflix network "
Which, on its face, you make it untenable. But then follow the link to their peering locations:
https://www.netflix.com/openco...

and its blank.

Netflix offers caching but Comcast/Verizon demand they pay for it despite the money they would save by hosting the cache. They're more interested in poaching Netflix's customers for their own streaming alternatives. This is what happens when Net Neutrality is not mandated.

No they don't.
https://www.netflix.com/openco...

Specifically: "The ISP network must be located in or connected to the same peering locations as the Netflix network "
Which, on its face, you make it untenable. But then follow the link to their peering locations:
https://www.netflix.com/openco...

and its blank.

They've been doing this for a year on Chrome OS

So Netflix works out a peering arrangement with Comcast to deliver traffic directly to Comcasts network and this is somehow bad?

It is when Netflix offered to solve the problem in a manner that would cost both companies less money and were refused.

The problem was that Netflix didn't give a shit about some customers because they paid the lowest bidder to be their bandwidth host.

Concern with network issues is why Netflix has offered CDN appliances at no cost for more than two years to ISPs. Comcast chose to refuse Netflix's offer to colo within their own DCs on their own internal network, which would have reduced latency and bandwidth costs to nothing. I tend to believe that Comcast is more concerned with Netflix's effect on their own content offerings, and pushing the additional costs to Netflix has the additional benefit of making *them* take the PR hit for any price increases that result.

Netflix doesn't take more than a few hundred kbps per stream

Bullshit it doesn't.

https://help.netflix.com/en/no...

Maintaining HD content over a 5Mb/s DSL connection was sketchy at best. A solid connection I might add. Often a movie would have to buffer at least three times in session. No packet loss with a continuous ping from another workstation in that period. Yup, full HD pushing the envelope; or trying to at any rate.