News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Netflix Downloads. Parent comment

Re:Netflix Downloads by izacus on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @11:32AM (#13072077)
You imply that there's speed throttling when streaming. There's not and it makes no difference if you're connecting to a streaming endpoint or just getting a downloaded file.

(Which you can confirm by fast availability of streamed content on torrent sites or if you actually test the streams.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Netflix Downloads by logicallee on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @11:39AM (#13072143)
Thanks. Are you saying you could "stream" a 50 minute episode in 3 minutes even before this announcement?

Your second statement (about torrent sites) implies that everyone was already "downloading" content and NetFlix's servers were happy to serve the streams as a single very fast download without regard to how long it should takes clients to consume that (i.e. no throttling) - is this correct?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Netflix Downloads by izacus on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @11:49AM (#13072259)
Yeah, at the end of the day, the player is also downloading and caching chunks. Usually faster than playback as well - precaching ahead so line fluctuations don't make your video stutter.
[ Parent | on HN ]