I don't understand the question, and I won't respond to it.
May 22, 2013 4:17 PM Subscribe
What are the Netflix engineers currently doing to make sure that this weekend's release of Arrested Development Season 4 will go off without a hitch?
When Simcity 5 launched in March 2013, the network connection required to play caused scores of problems, not the least of which were server outages. This is a recent example of many high-profile game launches that received mass negative backlash based around server availability and performance.
With the hype and excitement and sheer data required for Netflix to stream the 4th season of Arrested Development into the devices of thousands of fans this weekend, what preparation are they likely doing to make it a success and avoid the pitfalls of so many game launches?
When Simcity 5 launched in March 2013, the network connection required to play caused scores of problems, not the least of which were server outages. This is a recent example of many high-profile game launches that received mass negative backlash based around server availability and performance.
With the hype and excitement and sheer data required for Netflix to stream the 4th season of Arrested Development into the devices of thousands of fans this weekend, what preparation are they likely doing to make it a success and avoid the pitfalls of so many game launches?
There's an interesting article in Bloomberg Business Week that talks about previous big launches (House of Cards for example). The takeaway seems to be they are already the biggest server of internet content most of the time.
posted by 2bucksplus at 4:24 PM on May 22, 2013 [4 favorites]
posted by 2bucksplus at 4:24 PM on May 22, 2013 [4 favorites]
I bet the preparation was getting on the phone with someone at Amazon and giving them a heads-up. They already own their own CDN, and Amazon hosts the bulk of the remaining infrastructure.
posted by mullingitover at 4:24 PM on May 22, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by mullingitover at 4:24 PM on May 22, 2013 [1 favorite]
Netflix already accounts for a massive 1/3 of all internet traffic in North America so I can't imagine this release will have any impact on their ability to deliver.
The question is, will is it stream to Iraq and Wee Britain?
posted by ridogi at 4:25 PM on May 22, 2013 [7 favorites]
The question is, will is it stream to Iraq and Wee Britain?
posted by ridogi at 4:25 PM on May 22, 2013 [7 favorites]
Best answer: The lead reliability engineer at Netflix answered this question on Quora
posted by backwards guitar at 4:39 PM on May 22, 2013 [15 favorites]
posted by backwards guitar at 4:39 PM on May 22, 2013 [15 favorites]
I was JUST about to post that backwards guitar! Yes that's the answer.
posted by sweetkid at 4:41 PM on May 22, 2013
posted by sweetkid at 4:41 PM on May 22, 2013
You also over-estimating the draw of Arrested Development. It was a cult show. Sure a lot of people are looking forward to this, but I'd be surprised if it ends up with the viewers that House of Cards got. I know that's one of those internet statements that'll probably make me look stupid, but that's my prediction.
posted by cjorgensen at 5:38 PM on May 22, 2013 [5 favorites]
posted by cjorgensen at 5:38 PM on May 22, 2013 [5 favorites]
SimCity and other online games require their own unique backend; EA can't just re-use the same servers* they use for (say) SWTOR without at minimum rebooting them.
Video is video. Even disregarding that Netflix already works at a rather large scale, 'airing' a new series doesn't require doing anything special.
*barring some crazy feat of engineering to produce a common backend shared between all of EA's games, which is theoretically doable but highly unlikely.
posted by ConstantineXVI at 5:49 PM on May 22, 2013
Video is video. Even disregarding that Netflix already works at a rather large scale, 'airing' a new series doesn't require doing anything special.
*barring some crazy feat of engineering to produce a common backend shared between all of EA's games, which is theoretically doable but highly unlikely.
posted by ConstantineXVI at 5:49 PM on May 22, 2013
I don't think Netflix will see any increase in usage because of Arrested Development.
Instead people who are interested in Arrested Development and would normally be watching Movie A or TV Show B would just be watching Arrested Development when they would normally watch those other shows. That wouldn't increase the load on the back end at all.
posted by dgeiser13 at 6:38 PM on May 22, 2013
Instead people who are interested in Arrested Development and would normally be watching Movie A or TV Show B would just be watching Arrested Development when they would normally watch those other shows. That wouldn't increase the load on the back end at all.
posted by dgeiser13 at 6:38 PM on May 22, 2013
Can I jump in with my obtuse question (feel free to flag and delete if not)...
Will AD be watchable via Roku for the release or is the only viewing option streaming from a computer?
(You'll have to excuse me. I just blue myself.)
posted by kinetic at 4:00 AM on May 23, 2013
Will AD be watchable via Roku for the release or is the only viewing option streaming from a computer?
(You'll have to excuse me. I just blue myself.)
posted by kinetic at 4:00 AM on May 23, 2013
Streaming is streaming; to roku or desktop makes no difference kinetic.
posted by ook at 5:59 AM on May 23, 2013
posted by ook at 5:59 AM on May 23, 2013
cjorgensen - funny, because I thought "House of Cards has a comparable viewership to what they are expecting for Arrested Development?" I thought it was the opposite.
kinetic - We have seen promos for it on Netflix on our WD TV units. I can't think of a reason it won't be available on Roku - does Netflix even do that? (I know Youtube has different rights for different devices)
posted by getawaysticks at 5:59 AM on May 23, 2013
kinetic - We have seen promos for it on Netflix on our WD TV units. I can't think of a reason it won't be available on Roku - does Netflix even do that? (I know Youtube has different rights for different devices)
posted by getawaysticks at 5:59 AM on May 23, 2013
getawaysticks...Yeah! we watch Netflix on the Roku and I only signed up to get AD.
(preparing to walk away in cloud of Charlie Brown shame if it doesn't work)
posted by kinetic at 7:32 AM on May 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
(preparing to walk away in cloud of Charlie Brown shame if it doesn't work)
posted by kinetic at 7:32 AM on May 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
From the Netflix engineer on Quora:
Another nice side effect is that if an existing customer is watching AD it means they aren't watching something else, so we've already accounted for them. The only additional load will be from new users
I don't know about you guys, but I don't normally watch Netflix on Sunday morning, and I will be this weekend.
posted by benbenson at 11:45 AM on May 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
Another nice side effect is that if an existing customer is watching AD it means they aren't watching something else, so we've already accounted for them. The only additional load will be from new users
I don't know about you guys, but I don't normally watch Netflix on Sunday morning, and I will be this weekend.
posted by benbenson at 11:45 AM on May 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
I have to sort-of disagree with a couple of people who posted earlier:
Instead people who are interested in Arrested Development and would normally be watching Movie A or TV Show B would just be watching Arrested Development when they would normally watch those other shows. That wouldn't increase the load on the back end at all.
I personally haven't used my Netflix subscription more than an hour or two the last couple of weeks. When the 4th season of AD comes out, though, I'm mainlining that shit.
You also over-estimating the draw of Arrested Development. It was a cult show. Sure a lot of people are looking forward to this, but I'd be surprised if it ends up with the viewers that House of Cards got.
Arrested Development was a cult show when it was on, that's true. That's why it was cancelled. It was a show that had a very idiosyncratic sense of humor, and relied on people watching episodes in order and remembering minor details from previous shows. For both of those reasons, it failed to build up a large audience at the time.
But flash forward to the dawn of Hulu and Netflix. Both of these services let people easily watch multiple episodes (or seasons!), in a order, a format that suited the show much better than traditional TV. And since then, the show's popularity has spread through word-of-mouth.
I remember talking to friends and relatives back when the show was first on, and people either had never watched the show, or didn't understand its appeal. Flash forward to now. Everyone I know (some of them the exact same people who didn't watch the show when it was first out) considers Arrested Development to be a brilliant show. In addition to fans of the show, you're going to have people who know the show by word of mouth or reputation seeing the omnipresent advertising and checking out the new season of AD (or catching up on past seasons.)
So in conclusion, cjorgenson, I will put money (not in excess of $10.00 USD) saying that the AD premier will beat the House of Cards premier.
posted by Green Winnebago at 4:07 PM on May 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
Instead people who are interested in Arrested Development and would normally be watching Movie A or TV Show B would just be watching Arrested Development when they would normally watch those other shows. That wouldn't increase the load on the back end at all.
I personally haven't used my Netflix subscription more than an hour or two the last couple of weeks. When the 4th season of AD comes out, though, I'm mainlining that shit.
You also over-estimating the draw of Arrested Development. It was a cult show. Sure a lot of people are looking forward to this, but I'd be surprised if it ends up with the viewers that House of Cards got.
Arrested Development was a cult show when it was on, that's true. That's why it was cancelled. It was a show that had a very idiosyncratic sense of humor, and relied on people watching episodes in order and remembering minor details from previous shows. For both of those reasons, it failed to build up a large audience at the time.
But flash forward to the dawn of Hulu and Netflix. Both of these services let people easily watch multiple episodes (or seasons!), in a order, a format that suited the show much better than traditional TV. And since then, the show's popularity has spread through word-of-mouth.
I remember talking to friends and relatives back when the show was first on, and people either had never watched the show, or didn't understand its appeal. Flash forward to now. Everyone I know (some of them the exact same people who didn't watch the show when it was first out) considers Arrested Development to be a brilliant show. In addition to fans of the show, you're going to have people who know the show by word of mouth or reputation seeing the omnipresent advertising and checking out the new season of AD (or catching up on past seasons.)
So in conclusion, cjorgenson, I will put money (not in excess of $10.00 USD) saying that the AD premier will beat the House of Cards premier.
posted by Green Winnebago at 4:07 PM on May 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
I STRONGLY suspect Netflix will have crashed by the time I, a West Coaster, wake up on Sunday morning. Like I would probably bet good money on it, were I a betting woman. And like benbenson, I don't normally stream Netflix on Sunday mornings and would try it this time. This has got to be a bigger hit than House of Cards, plus holiday weekend....
Anyway, I'm assuming that I will have to watch something else for several hours during an outage on Sunday.
(erm, also, I don't understand the logic behind why it's not going to fail, such as "we already have viewers" or something?)
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:45 PM on May 23, 2013
Anyway, I'm assuming that I will have to watch something else for several hours during an outage on Sunday.
(erm, also, I don't understand the logic behind why it's not going to fail, such as "we already have viewers" or something?)
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:45 PM on May 23, 2013
To answer one question somewhat quantifiably, Google Trends shows similar peaks for House of Cards, Hemlock Grove, and Arrested Development (which hasn't, obviously, peaked yet -- but has more front-end interest than either of the other two). For comparison all of these are dwarfed by hit movie search terms, e.g. Great Gatsby.
I tend to agree with the assessment that Netflix viewers for AD are Netflix viewers already for the most part, and much of the traffic will just be shifted from some other content -- but obviously there will be an initial spike of interest. Netflix, however, has some of the finest QoS engineers on the planet working on this problem and uses the equally fine Amazon cloud as its back end. There are major differences between streaming fixed, identical content to lots of nodes (something that various cloud architectures do quite amazingly well) and having central servers handle lots of reactive processing for interactive gaming. I don't anticipate hiccups, personally.
Besides I haven't finished S3 yet.
I don't normally watch Netflix on Sunday morning
...which is likely one of their traffic troughs, so I would be even less worried if that's when you're going to start.
posted by dhartung at 3:10 AM on May 24, 2013
I tend to agree with the assessment that Netflix viewers for AD are Netflix viewers already for the most part, and much of the traffic will just be shifted from some other content -- but obviously there will be an initial spike of interest. Netflix, however, has some of the finest QoS engineers on the planet working on this problem and uses the equally fine Amazon cloud as its back end. There are major differences between streaming fixed, identical content to lots of nodes (something that various cloud architectures do quite amazingly well) and having central servers handle lots of reactive processing for interactive gaming. I don't anticipate hiccups, personally.
Besides I haven't finished S3 yet.
I don't normally watch Netflix on Sunday morning
...which is likely one of their traffic troughs, so I would be even less worried if that's when you're going to start.
posted by dhartung at 3:10 AM on May 24, 2013
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Also, a lot of their system is reliant on Amazon Web Services, which offer scalable computing resources that can grow on demand, and unlike EA, theirs is actually made to scale.
posted by zabuni at 4:23 PM on May 22, 2013 [3 favorites]