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Netflix Throttling Instant Video Streaming
rsk writes "For the last few weeks I've been experiencing terrible streaming video performance from Netflix on both my Xbox 360 and PC. While my Xbox 360 would at least stream at a lower resolution, my PC cannot seem to avoid 2-hr. buffering times before playback even started. I smelled shenanigans and started digging. With some help finding the debug menu for the streaming video player, I set out to figure out why playback was so slow. It seems that Netflix is significantly throttling Watch Instantly users (on the PC) down to an unusable cap — in my case, 48 kbps — on a per-connection basis."
I dunno. I used it tonight and the speeds were fine even when fast fowarding through slow parts of my selected movie.
I'll try later tonight. The streaming is the only reason I use netflix. I haven't actually returned the one DVD I have in the last few months.
Netflix. Silverlight. And a series of tubes.
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Slashdot should actually do a little fact checking before posting stories such as this. I have the Netflix service and it works perfectly, the problem here is the user's internet connection or internal network. The testing he utilized tripped of a DDOS on the Limelight network content delivery service.
Netflix doesn't even deliver the streams to individual users, so if this were an actual problem Limelight would be the one to go after, not netflix. Again, there is nothing wrong with netflix, the problem is behind the keyboard.
Now we have confirmed that Netflix is throttling instant streaming PC-users to a rediculous 50 or 60 KB/sec cap
That's an interesting argument. He showed that each thread was throttled to 50 or 60 KB/sec, but he never had any evidence to support his argument atht it's netflix at fault, not his ISP or some other internet issue.
Why not 640kbps? After all, 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I read this article, and it seems to me this guy came to a conclusion before he came to an experiment.
What he DID prove is that a Netflix server in LA was only handing out 50KB/sec per http socket. Most web type servers will do this when under heavy load- better to give everybody a little bit than a few people a lot and the others nothing. I think this is correct behavior for a heavy-load situation.
However, when he accuses them of throttling, along with the way this article is titled, STRONGLY implies that they are throttling specific users who use too much. If he wanted to prove this the test is simple- log out of netflix and log in with a friend's account, preferably a friend who doesn't stream much.
Throttling also implies that Netflix is intentionally reducing the connection quality. I see no logical reason for them to do this to EVERYbody, as that would make the Instant Watch service useless for everybody. Far more likely, as stated above, is that he's on an overloaded server.
So my take on it is this article is incompletely researched, draws a bad conclusion (which doesn't make much sense) from too little evidence, and doesn't perform the one test needed to actually verify it's claim.
--IronHelix
Of course, it saves a heap of time and money on all of that testing and revision crap
Arrrrrrrr Life's grand ain't it?
Eat sleep die
In his blog lambasting Neftlix, he says:
"Bringing up the Status window I noticed my download performance was a far cry from my 7 mbps speed, but rather a measly 0.48 mbps, about 1/14th the speed of my line"
In the article summary above, he's now saying 48 kbps.
0.48mbps is actually 480kbps, so he's off by a factor of 10, which (while still pretty crappy) makes it sound much worse than it actually is. So which one is it, OP?
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
If there is any throttling going on, it is more likely that your ISP is responsible for it. Cable companies and DSL providers who are getting into the video on demand business may not like Netflix beating them to market with a more cost effective product...
KDawson, you're pissed at Blockbuster and now Netflix. Can no one please you?
/. as your personal pulpit.
Perhaps you should go back to reading books and not use
Yes I do feel 2 posts in 8 hrs is excessive. And yes I fully expect your "friends" to mod me down.
Netflix streaming seems to work just fine to my PC - I just tried it. It works fine to my Tivo as well. On occasion, there are problems - but as a reasonably intelligent adult, my first assumption isn't that Netflix is causing these problems intentionally. And you know what? If I go back and try again later, things usually have sorted themselves out!
I have to wonder about the average age and/or maturity level of some Slashdot submitters, as well as the editors approving these "stories"...
#DeleteChrome
1.6 megabytes per second is 12.8 megabits per second, which is 80% of the speed of your pipe. Sounds pretty respectable to me.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Throttling streaming video is so nonsensical that my personal suspicion is PEBCAK or an ID10T error.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Wow, is Slashdot making a news article out of every morons malware induced performance issues? I watch Netflix Instant View DAILY (love the Kojak, baby) and have NEVER had issues with bandwidth limiting in the last few weeks or ever for that matter. After I read the headline, I fired up Stargate Continuum on my PC (highest quality stream, according to the service menu) and my Xbox 360 (IN HD NO LESS) and it popped up instantly with no quality issues and no delay. Next time, try contacting your crappy ISP before you waste our time with your sky-is-falling BS.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Oh well.. I tried to go legit, but time to fire up bittorrent again, I guess. They are just shooting themselves in the foot.
Any time we have trouble it usually is associated with our provider Comcast, not Netflix. However, with some of the streams from Netfilx the audio is out of sync or the picture quality isn't as good as it should be.
We use the HD Tivo and at times I feel almost guilty for all I get from Netflix, with the 2 at a time unlimited, my actual dvd cost has been about $.95 per dvd (4 dvds a week) and I watch more instant shows than I do from Comcast. I cut back to 1 at a time starting next month, we just can not keep watching 4 rentals a week with the weather getting nicer. Netflix makes it easy to switch between the various plans.
Netflix cured me of downloading movies, I don't get the latest screeners these days but do get anything Netflix has, and they do carry a large selection of classics that you can't find with bittorrent - the best part is there are no upload ratios and I don't have to worry about getting to 90% and having all the seeders bail out. Some rentals you need to wait in line, but if you keep plenty in your queue, the rentals will arrive on a regular basis.
I do keep seeding Ubuntu & Kubuntu, bittorent is still great for linux . There will always be people that will want everything for free, but so far Netflix has done more to curb illegal downloading than any other effort. More companies should follow the Netflix lead, rather than play the silly lawsuit game. On the other hand, Rhapsody was not a worthwhile cost for us, in theory it sounded great but, for us the reliability just was not there, after several months we dropped that subscription - they might have improved it since that time.
>>>please remove "nospam" from email address
Oh well.. I tried to go legit, but time to fire up bittorrent again, I guess. They are just shooting themselves in the foot.
And that justifies downloading the movies? If you're going to do that, then do it, don't act as if netflix committing one sin is justification. I don't like the MPAA or the RIAA, but that's not why we download music or movies without paying for them. We do that because we can and it's cheaper than paying for it. Pointing to things netflix is doing wrong and saying "that's why I'm doing this" is just rationalization.
This. I stream Netflix vids on both XP and Vista boxes at different times of day, and I almost never see buffering. Maybe once a week if that. Either this guy cheesed off somebody at Netflix and they're picking on him, or there's something wrong with his connection or system config.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
One of my neighbors is a netflix subscriber. His work is such that he HAS to have access to the internet all the time. So he has both DSL and Cable through a router that allows him to use both. This router allows him to direct traffic through one ISP or the other. When he directs netflix through the cable connection, the video stream stutters and skips. When he directs it through the DSL connection, the problems disappear. This is despite the fact that the cable connection has a nominal bitrate that is much higher.
The conclusion that he came to is that his cable provider is messing with netflix because it is competition for their own on-demand service.
I think something similar may be happening here.
This makes a lot more sense than the notion that netflix would drive away customers by providing a broken service.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
> We do that because we can and it's cheaper than paying for it.
The fact that there is a nonzero number of users for Netflix's streaming service proves that's not true. Yeah, I could get everything off Bittorrent, but instead I'm an outspoken enthusiast for Netflix's instant streaming. Why would I, when it's cheaper and easier to just grab the torrent?
Because not everyone who downloads is the {MP,RI}AA caricature you seem to have bought into. We very much _want_ to "go legit", and we're waiting on the much-vaunted free market to deliver a solution that isn't 3 orders of magnitude more stressful to deal with than the Bittorrent method.
As a further example; since Amazon started selling non-DRM'd MP3 files that could be accessed from a Linux browser, I haven't gotten a single song that was available from them through any other channel, and every song that I've listened to from my pre-existing collection, I've gone back and purchased from them.
(Some) people want, very much, to support a legitimate online content delivery mechanism. We're still waiting on the free market to come up with one that isn't awful.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
With an average of a 50ms response time, Iâ(TM)m going to go ahead and say my 7 mbps Qwest DSL service is working as advertised,
Most likely his provider blows.
might just be his ISP throttling him if he streams a lot or is a heavy user or if theyre generally craptastic.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
me too. my mac is fast. I can speed test my connection for both burst and sustained transfers. I can watch Hulu and related without gaps. yet Netflix chokes. Not all the time. Just between 6 and 11 at night.
When you trace route the connection you find it makes about 5 hops in comcast network than about 5 to 10 hops in the limelight network. limelight is netflix's stream provider.
There appear to be huge latentcies-- like 500 milliseconds.
When I talk to the netflix techs they say the latencies are the issue. They cause packet resends.
I point out to them that if their streaming protocol were designed properly, given there is ample bandwidth, they should be able to work around the latency. Besides which I'd be even happier if I could switch between streaming (for browsing movies) and pre-loading them for viewing (like apple).
They say that they have no control over the transfer protocol--that's handled by silver light. and they have no control over the ability to buffer or pre-load because that's set by their drm contract's with the movie providers.
Basically if you want to watch a movie at assuredly good resolution and without gaps then maybe it's worth paying apple a couple bucks to pre-download it. Of course, the drawback is you have to know what you want to watch first.
Having done it both ways I find that part of the magic of a good movie is the immersive suspension of disbelief it creates when it is uninterrupted. So these interruptions are more than just annoying. They move the experience to a different part of your brain-- the part that likes TV not the part that suspends reality (like a good book can do).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I use the Watch Instantly all the time as I do not have cable and have no problems. I'd check with my ISP before blaming Netflix.
OP: Are you doing any P2P stuff with your connection? I think you better check all your activity before you go blaming Netflix.
ISPs are not common carriers, and never have been. It's a common misconception on Slashdot for some reason. Like this article notes, ISPs have historically not wanted to be regulated under the pre-existing common carrier regulations.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
The Roku player is only $100 and I have only had it stutter once when my maximum download speed via DSL was 1.5 Mbps.
I have upgraded to 7 Mbps service from Qwest and it works like a dream. I have Tomato on my router so can view the bandwidth as a real-time graph and I see pulses of around 5 Mbps down with about a 25-33% duty cycle.
Obviously you need to pipe the Roku output to something to display it. I pipe it to my TV instead of trying to watch movies on my Mac. But the convenience factor is very nice.
The Roku player has also just had a firmware upgrade that allows you to tie the player to Amazon as well as to Netflix. They say even more is coming. But it's now possible to rent or buy movies from Amazon to watch on the Roku too. Quality is the same as Netflix movies as best I can tell.
One thing to watch out for if you want to rent a movie on Amazon and have a Netflix account - make sure it isn't available on Netflix already for streaming viewing. It's interesting that a number of Amazons movies available to rent or buy are also available through Netflix as part of your regular account.
I use computers for lots of stuff but for me, watching a movie or TV show on a big display in my living room or bedroom is much nicer than sitting at my desk or holding a warm laptop.