I can confirm terrible video quality on 1Gb/s Xfinity connection in Chicago area. The NFL streaming picture quality looks like RealPlayer on a 56kbps modem from 1998. The ball becomes invisible as soon as it is passed or kicked! Blocky and ghosting artifacts. Not a network issue, every other site/app working great, it’s simply Netflix falling over during a live event again.

Live streaming is surprisingly a much different problem than pre-recorded streaming. It's no surprise that Netflix has had trouble with it in the past, though I'd expect them to have resolved their issues by now.

I wrote a detailed comment about it before. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42161376

I remember working in performance for a company that was building video delivery systems. That was about 10 years ago, but I still remember the celebration of 80Gbps, that was when we could deliver live HD quality events to about 5000 downstream customers using one such device. That was the hardware capacity of the platform that was used at that point.

I guess that technology evolved since then, but even so serving 1M customers shouldn’t need more than 200 instances. My wild guess is that Netflix either didn’t autoscale or that the rebalancing/anycast mechanism didn’t work properly.