> I would guess YouTube, being built on google's infrastructure , has powerful enough edge nodes that they stream one video stream to each edge ___location and the edges transcode for the clients.
Ha, no, our edge nodes don't have anywhere near enough spare CPU to do transcoding on the fly.
We have our own issues with livestreaming, but our system's developed differently over the past 15 years compared to Netflix's. While they've historically focused on intelligent pre-placement of data (which of course doesn't work for livestreaming), such an approach was never feasible for YT with the sheer size of our catalog (thanks to user-generated content).
Netflix is still new to the space, and there isn't a good substitute for real-world experience for understanding how your systems behave under wildly different traffic patterns. Give them some time.
It also helps that youtube serves shit tier quality videos more gracefully. Everyone is used to the step down to pixel-world on youtube to the point where they don’t complain much.
And decent part of these users are on free tier, so they are not paying for it. That alone gives you some level of forgiveness. At least I am not paying anything for this experience.
Live streams have different buffering logic to video on demand. Customers watching sports will get very upset if there is a long buffer, but for a VOD playback you don't care how big the buffer is. Segment sizes are short for live and long for VOD because you need to adapt faster and keep buffers small for Live, but longer download segments are better for buffering.
Ha, no, our edge nodes don't have anywhere near enough spare CPU to do transcoding on the fly.
We have our own issues with livestreaming, but our system's developed differently over the past 15 years compared to Netflix's. While they've historically focused on intelligent pre-placement of data (which of course doesn't work for livestreaming), such an approach was never feasible for YT with the sheer size of our catalog (thanks to user-generated content).
Netflix is still new to the space, and there isn't a good substitute for real-world experience for understanding how your systems behave under wildly different traffic patterns. Give them some time.