> I don’t understand how a company with billions of dollars in resources can fail to solve such a well trodden problem.
Billions of dollars don't give you good technical management and people with expertise to build such things. They only give an organization where there is no pressure to be good at anything and, you know, actually compete, there is only pressure to make sure they don't have to compete, that's how they got their billions after all. And it's not like there is a definitive guide or something that you can follow to build reliable systems without experts.
Issue is that BAMTech has not had to deal with this scale. Everything breaks at scale. That being said, the issues with the signup and login and servicing webpages are an understood problem at scale, so I do not give them a pass for those failures. On the stream side, Netflix wrote the book on it. There is a great deal of published work by Netflix team on this, down to kernel level coding and tweaking to get 100Gbs out of a single FreeBSD server.
I know if I had to build this I would throw money at the issue by making an outrageous offer to someone that has built this before (from maybe Netflix?) to come and do it for me.
As an aside I have worked on a project like this before on the networking side for the Olympics around 8 years ago. Heck, back in the .bomb I worked at a startup national ISP were doing QoS for video delivery was part of what we were doing. Never worked quite right.
Billions of dollars don't give you good technical management and people with expertise to build such things. They only give an organization where there is no pressure to be good at anything and, you know, actually compete, there is only pressure to make sure they don't have to compete, that's how they got their billions after all. And it's not like there is a definitive guide or something that you can follow to build reliable systems without experts.