The NFL on Netflix: how Netflix took on live TV and built the tech to make it work

Brandon Riegg has been trying to bring live TV to Netflix for a decade. He joined the company in 2016 after previously working at NBC, ABC and VH1, where he worked on shows such as Dancing with the Stars, The Voice, and America’s Got Talent. All of these shows are the kind of unscripted reality shows he was hired to bring to Netflix, but they also incorporate things like live voting to make the whole show feel more urgent and interactive. “I just feel that if we really want to be the preeminent entertainment provider in the world,” Rigg told me, “we should have all the tools at our disposal.”

So Rigg and Bela Bajaria, another longtime TV executive who joined Netflix around the same time and is now its chief content officer, began making the case around why Netflix should invest in what it needed to live content. technology. Time and time again, they got the same question: What do you want to do with it? For years, Rieger said, they didn’t have a good answer. “I’d say, ‘Well, I don’t have anything specific right now, but if something comes up that requires real-time capabilities, I want to be able to handle it immediately.'”

Over the years, this shrug answer hasn’t worked. But about two years ago, the energy shifted. “We’ve been talking about how we have something for everyone,” he said, “and some of the shows need to be live. In order for us to do these things, for us to buy these things, we need to have that capability.

Netflix has slowly learned how to live-stream programming and streaming over the past two years. It started with Chris Rock’s comedy special last March and was a technical and cultural success. A few weeks later it was broadcast live love is blind reunion show, which was such a disaster that the reunion was eventually filmed and subsequently released. And then there’s the live broadcast of baby orangutans from the Cleveland Zoo, a weird golf event between a Formula 1 driver and a PGA pro, the SAG Awards, a tennis exhibition, a Tom Brady show, and John Mulaney’s slightly unhinged late night show Everyone is in Los Angeles.

In some ways, all of this is just practice. Because the real test of Netflix’s live-streaming prowess comes this fall. First up was the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight in November, which the company said it watched More than 65 million Netflix subscribers are spread all over the world and have a large Technical difficulties and delays its own. Next, Two NFL games on Christmas Day, with a halftime performance by Beyoncé. The NFL is the largest and most valuable In the United States, football is an entertainment industry most talked about On TV by a mile. Netflix does a lot of things, but now it’s also a live TV network. And you can’t mess up football.

Many viewers were surprised when Netflix struggled to keep up with the Paul/Tyson fight. Netflix has been streaming content… Shouldn’t you be good at this? When I asked Elizabeth Stone, Netflix’s chief technology officer, this question, she said live streaming is very different from simply streaming. Perhaps more different than Netflix itself initially thought.

“When we stream video on demand,” Stone said, “we benefit from planning ahead. The content is in its final format; the video, images, audio are all in carefully packaged files, and they’ve gone through all the production steps, encoding steps and they are ready for placement on servers around the world via our content delivery network and ISPs.” Obviously, this is no small task, but Netflix has been doing it for two decades. It has seen every problem and proposed every solution. “So when members click play,” Stone said, “we’re ready for them to click play.”

When you’re filming and live streaming, you still need to do all of these things and more, but you have to do it on the fly. “The camera feed goes to the production truck, it’s ingested, it goes to the cloud and it’s encoded. Then we have to send it to your TV or your phone through our CDN, through our ISP. We have a few seconds to do that. Do it. Live streaming, even for one person, is difficult, sure—TV networks, streaming services, and tech companies do it every day—but it’s possible. It takes effort.

And then there’s the whole “65 million people” thing. Stone laughed when I brought it up. Netflix built, tested and planned as best it could, taking advantage of both real events and fake traffic to hit its infrastructure, she said. “But no lab can simulate what happens to our system when 65 million people are watching at the same time.” Even on Netflix’s busiest days ever, it doesn’t get that much traffic at once.

Stone divides Netflix’s system into two parts. It’s a generalization, she said, but close enough. “When you log into Netflix and scroll through the homepage, watch trailers, and decide what to watch, it’s all powered by AWS servers.” Netflix is ​​a big customer of Amazon Web Services, which is now the mainstay of most websites. pillars of the road. Having tens of millions of people browsing the app simultaneously creates a huge traffic burden, but AWS scales quite well, and Stone said some of Netflix’s features were maintained even during the battle.

However, once you press play, the system switches to Netflix’s own Open Connect system, which is generally considered The best in the streaming business. When Netflix first started in the streaming business, it invested a lot of money in its infrastructure, but again: 65 million people. “I think any company would face challenges of this magnitude,” Stone said. “We have these tightly coupled connection points between our servers, our Open Connect equipment, and the last mile that the ISP provides to the equipment. All of that is overloaded in the battle.

Before the event, you have no way of knowing who will be watching, where they will be, and what might happen. The Internet is a finite thing, and there’s only so much bandwidth available in the cables that connect things; if an event is unexpectedly popular in Los Angeles, it’s going to struggle in Los Angeles even if it does well elsewhere. “Think of it as the difference between a truck delivering 100 bottles of water versus having to deliver tap water to 100 people at the same time,” said Fastly CEO Anil Dash. Recently written. “One problem is moving some data from one place to another, and another problem is maintaining high-volume live streaming at scale. When there’s not enough water supplied to all those hoses, everyone gets a little less water.

Stone agrees the hose is a challenge. “All streamers,” she said, “we all face this question: How much bandwidth? Are we going to need bandwidth at the same time that so many other streams need bandwidth? Netflix can’t be on your phone line Digging trenches or laying more cables – certainly not possible before Christmas – so all it can do is try to optimize the system.

Stone said Netflix has been working to increase capacity and control bandwidth traffic more effectively since the Paul-Tyson fight. “We have enhanced Open Connect servers, and some ISPs have also enhanced the capacity they provide,” she said. They focused specifically on places that were overloaded during combat, although she didn’t specify which ones. Internally, the team is also working on optimizing the algorithms that decide how to prioritize traffic and bandwidth.

There probably won’t be as many people watching football matches on Christmas Day as there are people watching the games. Netflix’s live events may never be that big again — there aren’t many one-off cultural moments that can captivate audiences. But Stone said she was pleased to see the system so severely overburdened and stressed because now teams know what to expect. “If we just pivoted a little bit from some of the early live events, it would have taken us longer to get those lessons,” she said. She believes that by pushing the lever all the way to the end, Netflix is ​​now ready for anything.

To be clear, though, not even Stone is promising that football games will be played perfectly. All she would say is that she likes a challenge.

Even if the Christmas competition goes well, the Netflix team won’t have much time to rest. On January 6, it will air the first episode of a new weekly series: WWE Raw, Flagship wrestling show. Netflix purchased the rights to the show for $5 billion and is responsible for streaming it over the next decade. In 2027 and 2031, Netflix will also Live FIFA Women’s World Cup. Both have huge intrinsic interest, and both have created a huge stir around the world. They are also recurring shows, which will keep subscribers subscribed. This is important to Netflix.

It’s also just simple math. The most popular programs on television today are live: sporting events, award shows, and more. These shows have the highest ratings and the highest advertising rates, and Netflix is ​​now rapidly trying to build its own advertising business. It’s why Amazon pays for NFL broadcast rights, why Peacock is all in on the Olympics, and why even prices for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade are going up. In an increasingly fractured entertainment landscape (which, of course, is partly Netflix’s fault), must-see live TV is more valuable than ever.

Rigg, who oversees all of this content selection, is convinced that live streaming and sports are not the same thing for Netflix. He seemed excited by the idea of ​​bringing people together, creating communal moments where everyone was watching and talking about the same thing at the same time. Of course, Netflix is ​​perhaps the company most responsible for this Finish Achieve a single culture by making a vast library of content available to everyone, everywhere, at any time. But Rigg thinks the platform should bring back some of that classic live TV energy. “Remember Felix Baumgartner’s Red Bull Space Jump?” he asked me. “I remember everyone in the office watching this – there was still a fear that anything could happen. We were all going through this at the same time.

Rigg said Netflix is ​​interested in buying more of these events, but he also wants to produce them himself. This leads Rigg to his big question of the moment: “What is our version? Dancing with the Stars? Or what is our version America’s Got Talent? That’s what Netflix’s unscripted team is currently doing — taking a familiar format and adding a live element. Because Netflix is ​​so big and global, Rigg thinks it has an opportunity to do something truly new. “If we had sound, Everyone around the world can have an opinion and weigh in on who should win? It’s community watching on a different level.

I mentioned to Rigg that I had been very committed to american idol Fan, his eyes widened. “We’ll never see another one Idol,” He said: “In terms of the gap between the two Idol and a second-place performance. But we can certainly try to say, what’s the next iteration? It’s clear he and the team have some ideas, although Rigg won’t tell me what they are. Together we must find out and stay alive.