Netflix's edge nodes are optimized for streaming already encoded videos to end users. They have to transcode some number of formats from the source and send them all to the edge nodes to flow out. It's harder to manage a ton of different streams flowing out to the edge nodes cleanly.
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. Only one stream from source to edge to worry about and is much simpler to support and reason about.
But that's just my wild assed guess.
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.
Even the best latency is dozens of seconds behind live action.
Your ISP doesn't have enough bandwidth to the Internet (generally speaking) for all users to get their feed directly from a central location. And that central location doesn't have enough bandwidth to serve all users even if the ISP could. That said, the delay can be pretty small, e.g. the first user to hit the cache goes upstream, the others basically get the stream as it comes in to the cache. This doesn't make things worse, it makes them better.
I think this could be one of upsells that Netflix could use.
Premium: get no delay
Normal users: get cache and delay
You know, like every other broadcaster, streaming platform, and company that does live content has been able to do.
Acting like this is a novel, hard problem that needs to be solved and we need to "upsell" it in tiers because Netflix is incompetent and live broadcasting hasn't been around for 80+ years is so fucking stupid.
Sample size 1, but...
I saw a ton of buffering and failure on an embedded Netflix app on a TV, including some infinite freezes.
Moved over to laptop, zero buffering.
I assume the web app runs with a lot bigger buffer than whatever is squeezed into the underpowered TV.
E.g. "give me this previous chunk" vs "send me the current stream"
