Covid-19: Netflix to reduce streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

KildareP · 20-03-2020 9:29am #1

What think ye of this?
https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0319/1124244-netflix-eu/

Essentially Netflix have stated they will cut bitrates by ~25% in Europe, I assume by not letting EU customers hit the top tier of the adaptive streaming bitrate ladder for each of the different profiles they have for SD, HD, 4K and HDR, for the next 30 days.

On the one hand, I imagine that Netflix streaming traffic is through the roof at the moment given everyone working at home so traffic is likely to be significantly up both in volume and the length of the day.

On the other hand, because of the way Netflix aims to get content to the end user, by offering a free content cache server placed inside each country's peering exchange (INEX for Ireland) and also inside the bigger ISP's datacentres (Eir and BT, which includes Sky and possibly still 3 Ireland customers, being two ISP's I know of that have one). The vast majority of Netflix content is thus not actually served from "the internet" at all. Any contention will be at the ISP level as opposed to "the internet" level.

Netflix bitrates weren't industry leading to begin with, although they seem by far the biggest streaming player at least this side of the Atlantic waters so likely to be able to achieve greatest impact in reducing anything they can, so I'm wondering how this will further impact picture quality and whether it will actually make a difference at all?

silver2020 · 20-03-2020 9:35am

It's not a netflix issue.

All streaming services have been asked to reduce the bandwidth used where possible.

Netflix are complying with this request and should be congratulated for doing so and hopefully all other services that cause high usage follow suit.

The "superfast Highway" will become like the M50 on a wet December morning if some form of downgrading of usage is not implemented.

KildareP · 20-03-2020 9:41am

silver2020 wrote: »

It's not a netflix issue.

All streaming services have been asked to reduce the bandwidth used where possible.

Netflix are complying with this request and should be congratulated for doing so and hopefully all other services that cause high usage follow suit.

The "superfast Highway" will become like the M50 on a wet December morning if some form of downgrading of usage is not implemented.

It's not a Netflix issue, that is true, but they were the first to respond, despite being best positioned to already minimise internet traffic globally as it is, for the reasons I outlined above. Netflix - rightly or wrongly - push the majority of the contention into the individual ISP network and off the wider internet.

Google, Amazon and Sky - amongst others - have not yet made any comment.

TheIrishGrover · 20-03-2020 9:53am

Well, I suppose it couldn't hurt. Netflix are, ironically, hosted in Amazon Cloud (AWS). While, ideally, their output shouldn't affect other people, I suppose it's a case of preventative action. I would imagine that they will all do it.

lawred2 · 20-03-2020 10:00am

KildareP wrote: »

It's not a Netflix issue, that is true, but they were the first to respond, despite being best positioned to already minimise internet traffic globally as it is, for the reasons I outlined above. Netflix - rightly or wrongly - push the majority of the contention into the individual ISP network and off the wider internet.

Google, Amazon and Sky - amongst others - have not yet made any comment.

Rightly... They don't push any contention anyway. That content would have to be streamed through the ISP regardless.

snaps · 23-03-2020 7:22am

Ive noticed a lot of professional meeting platforms like Zoom are struggling at peak times, mainly afternoons and evenings when the USA comes online.
Skype still seems fairly solid all the time.
Youtube at times doesn't connect, mainly afternoons and evenings.
I cant imagine the extra network/Internet traffic now from all these world wide people working and socialising from home.

Nuphor · 25-03-2020 4:50pm

Time to adjust down from the 4k plan in the meantime I guess

KildareP · 25-03-2020 5:29pm

snaps wrote: »

Ive noticed a lot of professional meeting platforms like Zoom are struggling at peak times, mainly afternoons and evenings when the USA comes online.
Skype still seems fairly solid all the time.
Youtube at times doesn't connect, mainly afternoons and evenings.
I cant imagine the extra network/Internet traffic now from all these world wide people working and socialising from home.

Zoom seems fairly OK throughout the day for what we're using it for in work which, in fairness, is pretty heavy.

Office365, on the other hand, has effectively sat down around 1PM for the last three days. We rely heavily on OneNote, OneDrive, Teams and Stream and the delays on syncing amongst users is making them very difficult to use in the afternoon.

Skype is still P2P I think, so you connect directly to the person on the other hand rather than relying on a cloud provider in the middle.

Funnily enough, Netflix still seems to be streaming full 4K HDR at the usual 15Mbps for me last night but HD shows are down to around 2Mbps compared to the usual 5Mbps or so.

AppleTV+ has gone full on SD with <2Mbps across the board.

Slim Charles · 25-03-2020 7:49pm

KildareP wrote: »

Zoom seems fairly OK throughout the day for what we're using it for in work which, in fairness, is pretty heavy.

Office365, on the other hand, has effectively sat down around 1PM for the last three days. We rely heavily on OneNote, OneDrive, Teams and Stream and the delays on syncing amongst users is making them very difficult to use in the afternoon.

Skype is still P2P I think, so you connect directly to the person on the other hand rather than relying on a cloud provider in the middle.

Funnily enough, Netflix still seems to be streaming full 4K HDR at the usual 15Mbps for me last night but HD shows are down to around 2Mbps compared to the usual 5Mbps or so.

AppleTV+ has gone full on SD with <2Mbps across the board.

Teams has been acting the maggot since last week, especially instant message feature.

ED E · 25-03-2020 9:06pm

TheIrishGrover wrote: »

Well, I suppose it couldn't hurt. Netflix are, ironically, hosted in Amazon Cloud (AWS). While, ideally, their output shouldn't affect other people, I suppose it's a case of preventative action. I would imagine that they will all do it.

The limitation is not with AWS, its all last mile.

alec76 · 26-03-2020 7:00pm

KildareP wrote: »

Funnily enough, Netflix still seems to be streaming full 4K HDR at the usual 15Mbps for me last night

....and it’s gone.
7.62 mbps for 4K HDR at the moment.

Marlow · 26-03-2020 7:42pm

ED E wrote: »

The limitation is not with AWS, its all last mile.

Not quite. Some of the content servers also have been struggling, where last mile was fine.

Especially intercontinental.

Netflix also had capacity issues at some nodes and Google have just added 100 Gbit/s to their existing I believe 40 Gbit/s at INEX.

/M

KeRbDoG · 26-03-2020 9:05pm

Every major content provider have CDNs in the major metros, in Ireland that would most likely just be Dublin. Either on the ISPs network or right beside, at the edge of their own network.
I didn't hear of any ISP calling for the likes of Netflix to reduce possible customer bandwidth usage (unless I missed it), it was coming mostly from politicians who know bugger all. I thought all ISPs went 'sure its grand, we plan for this'

snoopboggybog · 26-03-2020 9:10pm

My guess is that their afraid their own servers and own bandwidth will be overloaded due to the amount of people at home now and their setup won't be able to handle it.

I think there just protecting themselves really. Also probably huge costs on increasing their bandwith just for this epidemic so may as well just decrease the quality.

Marlow · 26-03-2020 11:05pm

KeRbDoG wrote: »

Every major content provider have CDNs in the major metros, in Ireland that would most likely just be Dublin. Either on the ISPs network or right beside, at the edge of their own network.
I didn't hear of any ISP calling for the likes of Netflix to reduce possible customer bandwidth usage (unless I missed it), it was coming mostly from politicians who know bugger all. I thought all ISPs went 'sure its grand, we plan for this'

Netflix had issues with buffering due to capacity issues on their own servers in Ireland, which actually wasn't access related. But that only started about 2-3 days before they anyhow were asked to decrease bandwidth, so they fixed the problem that way .. for now.

This sort of c*** usually only hits the fan, when it's consistent for more than a week across the board. People will first try to troubleshoot their own setup, seeing that for example Youtube or another service still is working flawless. Then contact either Netflix or their provider. And only as the problem persists, it becomes commonly known.

Google turned around .. and while they also decreased quality on video streams (Youtube, Google Video), they knew, they were on the limits here in Ireland before COVIT-19 hit. So their upgrade came timed just about right.

They have 20 Gbit/s each on LAN#1 and LAN#2 of INEX. An extra 100 Gbit/s on LAN#1 went live today or yesterday. And LAN#2 is also awaiting another 100 Gbit/s coming online. There's a reason for that. And it's not access congestion.

/M

Impetus · 12-04-2020 2:36pm

This bit rate fiddle is a scam that was created by the EU, when they made a stupid blanket suggestion to reduce bandwidth use. And Netflix, Youtube and others took advantage of it.

Netflix is distributed usually by Netflix appliances at your ISPs facilities. The video data does not travel over the 'internet'.

The traffic on https://www.inex.ie/ixp/statistics/ixp is up, but not up in geometric amounts.

I don't live in Ireland, but I have noticed how poor the sound quality has got even on calls to landline numbers in Ireland, especially when somebody in Ireland calls you who is elsewhere. The telcos are taking advantage of the virus to reduce service quality to save money on bandwidth. Fortunately, telcos in most of the rest of Europe have not engaged in this scam. Comreg has made additional spectrum available to mobile operators. However it has made no difference to sound quality.

You can fortunately get good sound quality on free services that use the Opus CODEC.

eg the Signal app for mobile phone calls and jitsi.org for free video conferencing, which works on PCs, Apple, Android, Linux and iPhone devices, with HD video quality. (The app is best used from a WiFi or other fixed connections rather than via mobile data - which is a waste of spectrum for non-emergency matters).

Both these open source systems offer far better sound and picture quality than expensive monthly fee based alternatives.

I pay serious money for internet capacity and good call quality. I expect to get what I pay for. And I expect a refund from Netflix for the extra they charge for UHD services that they are not delivering, once this viral mess is over.

The only services that have an excuse are some cloud based service providers who are running out of physical server capacity due presumably to increased WFH. However they are still happy to accept new paying customers for their over worked systems.

Marlow · 12-04-2020 4:19pm

It is up extraordinary.

One ISP reported peaking at 175% yesterday of what they usually see at christmas time .. that's when it normally is the busiest.

And Netflix still has to serve their entire portfolio. Not all of which is cached everywhere. There are a lot of factors, that you forget to think about. These local caches don't have the capacity to store the entire portfolio, so your logic is completely flawed. They cache the most watched stuff only.

/M

Marlow · 12-04-2020 7:30pm

Oh .. may I add, that poeple by now probably have watched most of what's worth watching on Netflix and have moved on to for example Disney+, which is even worse.

They are using Limelight as their CDN and that means all of that traffic has been moved to the internet providers more expensive upstream plus Disney+ encoding is terrible for bandwidth usage.

So you looking at INEX alone does not paint a usable picture. There are far too many vectors that you omitted in your logic.

/M

digiman · 13-04-2020 10:11am

Any idea what % of Ireland's internet traffic is going through INEX? Their traffic is peaking at approx 0.5Tb/s which is pretty low, I would expect it to be more around the 4-5Tb/s for the entire country as a rough estimate.

ED E · 13-04-2020 6:53pm

Marlow wrote: »

Oh .. may I add, that poeple by now probably have watched most of what's worth watching on Netflix and have moved on to for example Disney+, which is even worse.

They are using Limelight as their CDN and that means all of that traffic has been moved to the internet providers more expensive upstream plus Disney+ encoding is terrible for bandwidth usage.

So you looking at INEX alone does not paint a usable picture. There are far too many vectors that you omitted in your logic.

/M

You sure?

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/bd255l/disney_is_yet_another_win_for_amazon/

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) has selected AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. Disney will expand its use of AWS to migrate production workloads to the AWS Cloud. Disney already leverages AWS’s industry-leading services for a wide variety of use cases, including websites and digital properties across all its brands, analytics, mobile, business applications, and machine learning.

ED E · 13-04-2020 6:55pm

digiman wrote: »

Any idea what % of Ireland's internet traffic is going through INEX? Their traffic is peaking at approx 0.5Tb/s which is pretty low, I would expect it to be more around the 4-5Tb/s for the entire country as a rough estimate.

INEX is essentially there for the little guy, all the big players peer directly. Id guess 5Tbps would be the low end.

KildareP · 13-04-2020 7:17pm

ED E wrote: »

You sure?

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/bd255l/disney_is_yet_another_win_for_amazon/

Everything bar streaming to the end user is done in AWS.
Same as Netflix.

KildareP · 13-04-2020 7:25pm

Marlow wrote: »

Oh .. may I add, that poeple by now probably have watched most of what's worth watching on Netflix and have moved on to for example Disney+, which is even worse.

They are using Limelight as their CDN and that means all of that traffic has been moved to the internet providers more expensive upstream plus Disney+ encoding is terrible for bandwidth usage.

So you looking at INEX alone does not paint a usable picture. There are far too many vectors that you omitted in your logic.

/M

Are they exclusively using Limelight? That must be hitting Disney hard since they've nothing on the ground here.

I had read they were using Akamai and Fastly amongst others - both of whom have peering points at INEX though.

ED E · 13-04-2020 8:00pm

KildareP wrote: »

Everything bar streaming to the end user is done in AWS.
Same as Netflix.

The difference between them being this side of the pond Netflix has extensive caching in ISP prem, I don't think Disney have any.

Marlow · 13-04-2020 8:06pm

KildareP wrote: »

Are they exclusively using Limelight? That must be hitting Disney hard since they've nothing on the ground here.

I had read they were using Akamai and Fastly amongst others - both of whom have peering points at INEX though.

I'm unsure, if exclusively. Don't think so. It's just what I've seen so far. Also, just because one is using, lets say Akamai, that doesn't mean that it's available at every Akamai cache. Also here, there are capacity limits.

ED E wrote: »

The difference between them being this side of the pond Netflix has extensive caching in ISP prem, I don't think Disney have any.

Correct. But the caching isn't helping Netflix much in the current situation, because a lot more of the entire portfolio gets requested, so there's plenty of uncached content coming across.

/M

Covid-19: Netflix to reduce streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

Comments