Netflix streaming woes are anything but

Neil Hunt, the Chief Product Officer at Netflix has been under attack for "streaming" problems that are affecting some Netflix users (Neil's response here). It's nearly impossible to determine what is affecting the users at the edge, but we can narrow it down to a few issues that reflect the state of streaming as is:

1. Limited CDN Capacity for streaming media servers for Adobe, Microsoft, Etc.
   
2. Regional/ Local/ In Home Network Congestion
3. Unicast streaming protocols (RTMP/ RTSP) don't deal well with congestion and/or latency at all.
   
4. Using highly unproven and beta products for streaming to the PC/ Mac (Silverlight)
   
5. The marketing risk of labeling any product as HD; consumers expect HD at all times, not realizing it is a qualifying statement (You can get HD, but if the following happens...)
6. Naive consumers who don't and won't understand the nature of open networks

There isn't a good way for Netflix to troubleshoot these issues - and frankly consumers who say they are "leaving Netflix" are doing so without any understanding of how the Internet works. It is also questionable how much Netflix cares about quality issues. Streaming problems only enhance the need for their core product of physical media distribution. Then there is the fact that most of the content available is of the B/C range (A to F scale); no "great" assets that create immediate demand outside of convenience.

We'll keep an eye on this one... but don't expect anything too drastic one way or the other.