(Preview) Monday Mailbag: Netflix and Its Mike Tyson Adventures; WBD Settles with the NBA; Lessons from Building Passport
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Hello, and welcome to a free preview of sharp tech. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of sharp tech. I'm under sharp and on the other line, ben thomson, then how you doing?

Little worried about my ability to podcast today. I just have this song stuck in my head on a boot. Hard to concentrate anything else.

What's on the .

bear still suck, are still suck. The bear still suck. And are you at all the time? At all time? Great hit. That one is very innovative, creative lyrics well.

and IT has been about my entire life where the bears have been awful. So i'm happy that you have that going for you again. We're not going to talk about the mowcher books on this podcast, but a good weekend to be a packer's said.

you know, yeah, well, the only one team can be good at a time that's the reality was but so what IT is okay. Well.

quick note to listeners next week, smell bag is gonna be our thanksgiving episode is the only show that we will do that week. So if you've got any fun questions you'd like us to have, please send them to email at sharp tech .

particular tech questions.

This is the giving .

deeper questions.

Yeah, exactly. We're going to let our hair down for the holiday week. As for this week, male bag, we're recording this on sunday night, east coast time. And Normally we put the run down together. On friday, I put the run down together on friday, east coast time, and I reworked this episode on sunday to account for a couple things that happened over the weekend that were news worthy.

So thing number one was the netflix fight with mike tyson and jake paul Joseph says, benin, Andrew is ten fifty five friday night in chicago and i'm fighting with netflix to get the paul tyson spectacle on a reliable stream. Netflix has done live events before, but tonight's stream has been a market departure from the quality I have come to expect from netflix and even the quality from what amazon manages for thursday night football. With two Christmas day nfl games coming up, how much risk is netflix under from having a technical stack and culture built for library streaming instead of live streaming? I'm sure this boxing event is designed to stress everything in advance of Christmas day, but man, they've got work to do.

So then you watch this event over the weekend. I did not watch this event. Do you have any thoughts on the technical execution we saw from netflix?

Well, I mean, I think first we have to examine you. mr. Man, I missed the monoculture.

Why I can everyone enjoy the same sort of thing and you're over here lording over everyone. I don't have time for this. I'm going to watch MBA league pass.

What do you have to say for yourself? Well, I mean, I think it's great that lots of people enjoy IT look .

at your moment ary wittles.

No, no, i'm not speechless. I just I want to work IT carefully. I'm glad that lots of other people enjoying IT. I don't want to ruin anyone's good time. My personal stance, I am a bit of an a little test here. I watch real sports, including real boxing, and I had no interest in participating in like the viral freak show that netflix was putting together. But IT seemed like everybody had a good time, at least once the stream started working for people yeah.

I don't know. The fight was very much for a good time to be tally honest. They actually the match is reading up to IT.

We're much more entertaining. IT. IT was a little sad. I felt a little guilty. What you get.

So like I told a couple people, mutual friends, that I was not watching the on friday night and somebody came back and said, well, maybe it's a generational thing like mike tyson was the biggest thing in the world when we were growing up. We being like the handful of genetics that are in our group chat, and I agree, didn't want to ruin the fund by arguing in that moment because the fight was about to start. But i'm sitting there thinking to myself like I may not have been a gene exer, but I know who mike tyson was and how much he meant, but like Larry bird was big in the late eight and I don't want to watch Larry bird play basketball. So i'm happy that, like, I got paid I mean.

I old IT was so enough coventry about the fight itself, the the overall. So I think just from a numbers perspective, if you talk about this fight, which netflix I think is reporting was sixty five million concurrent streams worldwide, that's a lot more than a football game like this was an event like I think amazon is in the mid teens as far as or twelve to fifteen million or something when IT comes to the third.

And football for cr, Christmas day will be more than that by on, it's still like we're talking like less than half what was going on the years. This wasn't a dry run for Christmas. This was actually the worst case scenario. I think it's finanical.

I mean, this is one of the most viewed events globally of the entire year. The presidential debate was a hair more popular with sixty seven million viewers on Linda television. Great that they were probably people watching on youtube. But what .

many in the U. S right this was what why I don't think as A U S only number but the um .

and just to put IT a perspective, last january, chief s dolphins on p cock abc paid one hundred and ten million dollars to air that game and averaged around twenty three million viewers at, peaked at twenty seven point six million viewer. So this was literally more than twice as popular as an nfl playoffs. Me, so yeah, netflix. C should be OK on Christmas day, but time will tell, I suppose. yeah.

I mean, the reality is, and this is sort of an interesting point, is that architecturally speaking, streaming is horribly suited alive events. This is Better. What a White grumbling along.

I like, look, guess what's good about cable having a wire in the ground that is dedicated IT all thinked up with every household in the neighbor od delivering the exact same thing. Turns out that works pretty well. So if you sort of zoom out, right, you have all all these sort of cameras in arena that are go to a production truck.

That production truck sends out one signal that no sort mixed on sight. That goes to a satellite dish that's on site, goes up to the satellite, goes down to whatever this the central office was. And if you go back to traditional broadcast, say, that goes to E S P N headquarters, right, or MBC headquarters or whatever IT might be, that is then rebroadcast to satellite dishes all over the country that are at the sort of main base station for.

I have charter or spectrum in in wisconsin. It'll go there. And then from there, it's distributed sort of to the houses in the area and it's distributed like it's a one to many sort of broadcast. So you have this this link that is a relatively local that is sort of a one to many broadcast and setting out the exact same signal on the exact same frequency like the set of wires and everyone watches IT at the same time.

And there's a bit if you go back yeah I if you go back like early twitter, there was the assumption when you were watching stuff that everyone was seeing a play happen at the same time. You know, obviously, there's the live aspect where the greatness of the watching live is the sort of two screen experience, and you can have twitter in your hand and be watching the game. And over the last few years, that's gotten a bit choppy.

I mean, here with the super bowl every year, where I think the last time we were all watching the super bowl, we being you, me and like ten other friends, all in different locations, but sort of texting during the game. And I think if I recall correctly, the person who is just watching IT on an antara was seeing IT like pretty much instantly. And the person who add, like this trickled out stream and whatever four kay, like they were like ninety seconds .

behind this ridiculous ly, pretty.

So you up hearing your hair out .

and it's footy. Like I just totally, very, i'm watching in taiwan over my cable in the us, and I was well ahead of a lot of people. It's like what what's going? I think I was actually, yes.

So it's it's kind of a mess. And the problem is this sort of one to many bit breaks down with streaming. So the way netflix works is netflix is actually pretty interesting because they have all these, they push out so much data and there's been disputes with them and cable companies over the years.

There's something I wrote about a long time ago. But today, what netflix does is they actually have like servers inside of I S peace. So if you go to your local spectrum facility in medicine, wisconsin or whether IT is there is like a bunch there's a server there with a bunch of hard drives that holds all the netflix content.

And netflix is actually just pushing IT relatively locally. And there's also like cdn and sometimes pushed out, but netflix actually takes this to another level where they're actually pushing their content out into these areas. But even if you are a central broadcasting thing, you you have to push IT out to A C D N.

A C D N is a similar idea. It's basically servers in I, S, P, S that over the world, like cloud flare, were the bigger cdn. They have points all over the world inside I S P.

That's a apart. Their business proposition is putting this hardware everywhere that mirrors the content from the central data. I mean, even where to get top of the sport later. A huge chAllenge will video is, is our cdn management particular ing customize content.

But we pushed out, say, a podcast you on a download IT has to be on a cdn, which means this distributed over the world and then you access IT and you pull down your and the problem is everyone is doing that on an individual basis. That works fine when you're watching shows on demand or you're watching netflix library content and it's Better. You get exactly what you want and they've work through a lot of technical chAllenges. So you can get that content that can be used as and that starts up quickly and it's smooth and all and everything .

else library content. Is that what they're sending to like the I S. So that is yeah reliable. That's right.

So it's pretty local to you and you you're connecting to IT and it's not going over sort of the public internet. The problem with the live event is you can do that. IT has to be pushed out live.

So it's going over the satellites. It's being broadcast and then you using the cdm layer. However, IT is our architecture.

I don't know the exact details, but the problem is that everyone is talking about IT. You're delivering this moleculars al moment. This is ideally the benefit to your business.

Which is people signed up because everyone's talking about this event. And then once they're signed up, maybe then they're all of you know, there are shows of why to catch up to. They were doing pro is during the fight for the football all game on Christmas and the other shows and you get the regular networks experience.

I think that's how they're thinking about this. Is IT a customer acquisition tool? It's not like it's not ever Green content like I I .

think about the my jack poll showdown for the last .

I yeah next year and we go back and retouch this the central moment in time. No, the entire value of IT was is happening right now. Everyone else is watching IT. That's the reason I watching, I thought, compel to participate in the model. Cute a moment.

yeah. I'm glad you explain the technical differences between streaming library content that's like already stored remotely all over the country versus one live broadcast that goes everywhere because one that's really interesting. And two, as a consumer, I was pretty surprised what I heard about the streams fAiling on friday night just because everything else netflix does has always been executed fallest. Ly, from a tech standpoint, like netflix in particular, relative to its peers, has always just been really good.

This might connected.

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