It seems over the past one week or so, iflix has moved its streaming servers to Amazon Cloudfront CDN.
Since then, I experienced so much of buffering while watching my favourite TV series and movies.
On Unifi, it now takes 14-15 hops to load iflix as contents were loaded from outside Malaysia, screenshot below:
In the past, iflix contents were loaded from within Malaysia. It had point of presence (POP) within key Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Malaysia. This means there were iflix servers within the network of Telekom Malaysia, Maxis, Celcom, P1, etc.
Details of POP here- http://searchtelecom.techtarget.com/definition/point-of-presence-POP
Basically it means that in the past, iflix contents loaded much-much-much faster from within the ISP network (locally) instead of loading the contents from other countries such as Singapore of Hong Kong.
As iflix contents are now hosted at Amazon, these local POP within ISPs are no longer used. The nearest Amazon server to Malaysia is Singapore. (Do share in comments if there’s a server in Malaysia).
Unfortunately, since Amazon CDNs are global, not all iflix contents are being loaded from the Singapore. For example, a trace via P1 network shows the content being loaded from Hong Kong..:( Prior to this, iflix contents were loaded from within P1’s network.
Long story short, I can’t watch a movie on iflix without any buffering, even on my 10Mbps Unifi.
I can only think of 2 reasons why iflix would do this:
- iflix is going to offer HD content, which requires more server bandwidth. Server upgrade needed.
- Because of Reason No.1, bandwidth cost is super high in Malaysia (thanks TM), thus it is more cheaper to deploy much faster, high speed servers Internationally, thus why iflix could have picked Amazon.
If these are true, I understand the business decision behind iflix, but as a customer, I kinda feel regret paying RM96 for 1-year iflix..:(