Startups absolutely sell things they haven't made yet and might not even be capable of doing.
Next thing you know it's 9pm on a Sunday night and your desperately trying to ship a build for a client.
Netflix isn't some scrappy company though. If I had to guess they threw money at the problem.
A much better approach would of been to slowly scale over the course of a year. Maybe stream some college basketball games first, slowly picking more popular events to get some real prod experience.
Instead this is like their 3rd or 4th live stream ever. Even a pre show a week before would of allowed for greater testing.
I'm not a CTO of a billion dollar company though. I'm just an IC who's seen a few sites go down underload.
To be fair no one knows how it's going to go before it happens. It would of been more surprising for them to pull this off without issues... It's a matter of managing those issues. I know if I had paid 30$ for a Netflix subscription to watch this specific event I'd assume I got ripped off.
Next thing you know it's 9pm on a Sunday night and your desperately trying to ship a build for a client.
Netflix isn't some scrappy company though. If I had to guess they threw money at the problem.
A much better approach would of been to slowly scale over the course of a year. Maybe stream some college basketball games first, slowly picking more popular events to get some real prod experience.
Instead this is like their 3rd or 4th live stream ever. Even a pre show a week before would of allowed for greater testing.
I'm not a CTO of a billion dollar company though. I'm just an IC who's seen a few sites go down underload.
To be fair no one knows how it's going to go before it happens. It would of been more surprising for them to pull this off without issues... It's a matter of managing those issues. I know if I had paid 30$ for a Netflix subscription to watch this specific event I'd assume I got ripped off.