What a difference a year makes.When Netflix secured WWE Raw, a three-hour weekly live broadcast with more than three decades of history, it marked a turning point. Raw is chao... Read more What a difference a year makes.When Netflix secured WWE Raw, a three-hour weekly live broadcast with more than three decades of history, it marked a turning point. Raw is chaos in motion: fan-fueled, unpredictable, impossible to rehearse. And now Netflix has to make it flawless. More than a licensing play. It’s an engineering gauntlet. Pulling it off means delivering a resilient platform that can handle global, live-grade performance every single week.  Raising the StakesLive streaming has, of course, been around for years. But the expectation that a global service can execute hours of live content flawlessly, at scale, every week, that’s new. Raw sets the new bar for resilience. And from here on, every live product will be judged against that standard, whether it’s financial trading, real-time auctions, or healthcare collaboration. How Netflix Built for Weekly LiveTo go beyond its on-demand stack, Netflix built a dedicated live media and data pipeline, piece by piece: Dual ingest with AWS MediaConnect and MediaLive for redundancy at the source.Two-second CMAF/HLS segments tuned for speed without overwhelming origin.Wall-clock aligned manifests to sync across devices and regions, even with edits.Adaptive ladders in AVC and HEVC balancing SD to 4K playback, mindful of constrained devices.Open Connect CDN with 18,000 servers in 6,000 locations, embedded in ISPs to slash startup time.Full-stack observability with Atlas, Mantis, and Lumen, surfacing drift and sync issues before users ever notice. For this approach, Netflix couldn’t build on top of an old stack. They’re deliberate adaptive platform choices that now set the standard for how live systems must be built. They had to replatform in a way that provided the most elasticity in the future.  Fragile Points That Remain Even with this purpose-built pipeline, the weak spots look familiar to anyone running live systems: Start-time surges hammer manifest and session services in the opening seconds.Origin contention can still trigger missing or delayed segments.Device diversity breaks the chain; older smart TVs or shaky networks fold under jitter.Regional edits introduce risk, where one mistimed segment can fracture continuity for millions. In live systems, small upstream cracks multiply quickly. What feels like a hiccup in testing can become a global outage in production.  The 8th Light Take At 8th Light, we’ve helped teams in healthcare, finance, and entertainment media face and address these same pressures. The lessons learned in these partnerships transcend industries: Resilience is the user experience. Stability may be invisible, but stalls and drift are not.Redundancy must be designed in. Dual ingest and encoding pipelines can’t be afterthoughts.Manifest rigor matters. Segment consistency is a discipline, not a last-minute patch.Adaptive tuning should know the content. Different scenes stress playback differently.Observability must span end-to-end. Ingest, origin, and device playback all need eyes.  The New Baseline Streaming WWE Raw every week on Netflix proves that massive live events can be delivered with consistency. The baseline has shifted. For engineering leaders, resilience is the product. The challenge now isn’t feasibility; it’s whether your systems can withstand failure, recover fast, and keep fans, patients, or traders in the flow without noticing the turbulence. Live is unforgiving. Fan expectations only climb higher. You know where we’ll be next week.  Show less

Using new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and observatories on Earth, scientists have confirmed the existence of Betelgeuse's elusive companion star, name... Read more Using new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and observatories on Earth, scientists have confirmed the existence of Betelgeuse's elusive companion star, named Siwarha. Show less

LUKE LITTLER has endorsed Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's potential return to Manchester United. Solskjaer, 52, has emerged as a strong contender to lead the Red Devils as interim boss until the end of the ... Read more LUKE LITTLER has endorsed Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's potential return to Manchester United. Solskjaer, 52, has emerged as a strong contender to lead the Red Devils as interim boss until the end of the season. The United legend performed a similar role following the sacking of Jose Mourinho in 2018, prior to landing the job full-time.... Show less

An international team of astronomers using a combination of ground-based telescopes, including the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, has discovered the first-ever spatially resolv... Read more An international team of astronomers using a combination of ground-based telescopes, including the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, has discovered the first-ever spatially resolved, gravitationally lensed superluminous supernova. The object, dubbed SN 2025wny, offers a rare look at a stellar cataclysm from the early Universe and provides a striking confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Show less

A Met Office weather warning is in force throughout the night

![CDATA[Amorim was sacked by Manchester United on January 5 after 14-months in charge.]]

Learn how extreme longevity and deep-sea adaptations allow Greenland sharks to preserve vision for centuries.

Astronomers found a handful of unusual objects in JWST survey data. These 9 point sources are being called 'Astronomy's Platypus' because, like the animal, they seem to defy categorization. They're... Read more Astronomers found a handful of unusual objects in JWST survey data. These 9 point sources are being called 'Astronomy's Platypus' because, like the animal, they seem to defy categorization. They're not like active galactic nuclei, and they're not like star-forming galaxies. What are they? Show less

Then again, so does your houseplant.

JACK GAUGHAN: Scans have confirmed that vice-captain Ruben Dias is set to miss up to six weeks with a hamstring problem and Josko Gvardiol has broken his leg.