Netflix showed last night that while its content delivery networks (CDNs) continue to work well delivering static content, I believe their edge infrastructure in regional internet exchange points (IXPs) were completely unprepared for a live presentation that millions of people were watching.

Netflix can start by adding more infrastructure in the 511 Building in downtown Minneapolis, because most people in this area that I talked to had to keep hitting refresh or go back 10 minutes in order to view a potato 240p stream of the fights.
However, if you used a VPN to modify your perceived location to a different area of the world, streaming worked a lot better with no buffering…HD even!

What is the most puzzling to me is how a company, that wouldn’t exist now without its technology infrastructure, and which has a net income of $2+ billion a quarter, and nearly a year in lead time before the fight, couldn’t possibly prepare better for this event. Things aren’t all well at Netflix.