I experienced this firsthand, when I used my Sony Blu-Ray to watch Netflix streaming it was shit, but worked much better with my Chromecast. I guessed maybe the Chromecast had a bigger buffer, but this explains it better.
But the question I have now is “why”? What do they have to gain by spending money on proxy servers and massive bandwidth? Surely not tracking what people watch, that could be handled much simpler by the device simply sending usage data to Sony, which would be about a millionth of the data vs proxying whole damn movies.
That article was pretty short on facts, unfortunately, but proxy services are generally there for more than just “see what you’re watching” purposes.
The primary reason ISPs in general do proxies is for bandwidth purposes. A bunch of people from the same ISP all want to watch the same movie on Netflix, it’s a lot easier on the ISP to have that movie loaded in their infrastructure somewhere so that they only have to pull the file from Netflix once, and then anyone who wants to watch it actually pulls it from a much closer location.
But, of course, this doesn’t really answer the Sony question–if the Sony box just acted as a generic internet device, any proxies it would use would be the ISP’s, not Sony’s. I suspect much of the answer is that we’re looking at Playstations here–gaming machines, so online features are not just web surfing and Netflix, there’s going to be a lot of gaming stuff, parental controls, etc–probably overall just a lot easier to just have the Playstations send all the data through Sony rather than having the box itself try to figure out what to sent through Sony and what to just send out.
Netflix offers their own proxy servers to ISPs for the same purpose dzeiger mentions. But because of the convoluted way that ISPs and internet backbone carriers buy and sell bandwidth, some service providers refuse the offers because they would lose money. Netflix actually seems to care about the users’ experience, but they can’t force an ISP or a device manufacture to use their proxies.
Due to this, as a WAG, Sony probably set up their own proxy to conserve their bandwidth but ensure they still get the bigger pile of cash in the bandwidth market. Shitty streaming for their customers doesn’t factor in at all.