Yep, there's the load problem I was expecting

[jducoeur]

Just went to do my morning run (in the basement, on the elliptical), where I'm currently watching Dark on Netflix. (Which, BTW, is a fascinating, twisty, and, yes, dark time-travel story, dubbed from the German.)

Loading Netflix to begin with took quite a while; loading the show took quite a while; and about five minutes in, it crapped out entirely and froze.

Sigh. I was expecting this to start happening -- even not counting the people working from home who are simply playing hooky, there are a lot of kids, folks out of work, and other people finding themselves stuck inside with nothing to do. And having made themselves the brand for "what to do when you're stuck inside", Netflix is presumably slammed, and starting to have difficulty with the load.

Hopefully they'll manage to scale up quickly. (Although, which China Inc in low gear due to the virus, that may be hard -- I would bet that server supply chains are a mess right now.) And more generally, ability to cope with the increased load is suddenly going to be a big competitive advantage for streaming providers that can pull it off.

And in the meantime, that gigantic stack of backlogged DVD courses from The Teaching Company is starting to look like a fine investment. It was prepping! Sure it was...

(Currently in the middle of "The Italian Renaissance" -- not as exciting as the McWhorter courses, but helps fill in some holes in my knowledge of period culture. Today was basically "So who was Petrarch, anyway?", which I had always been a tad fuzzy on.)