I don't think anyone on hackernews would be surprised by this. The scale they have to operate at is absolutely insane. To scale flawlessly on day 1 is a big ask of any development team.
Indeed. Last night I was telling my wife that it'll be real interesting to see how well the launch goes and that I'd expect them to have continuous issues for the first 3-6 months (which may be Netflix's only prayer).
Video is hard to get right, with quirks across many combinations of platform/device/OS/browser version/video card/playback resolution/format features, and it consumes around 90% of total internet traffic. Netflix has spent the last decade building and tuning a truly world-class content delivery system (big props to all the Netflix HN readers). There's no way Disney would've been able to match that prior to go-live.
The logical conclusion, of course, is that Disney should've just bought Netflix, and it wouldn't be too surprising to see that happen now that their internal attempt has proven that pixie dust doesn't go quite far enough to magically remediate the limitations of physics. Gotta get Netflix-esque content delivery appliances colocated alongside ISP hardware for that type of thing.
I believe disney has every advantage in the streaming wars so i decided to see if they have any open dev positions and i also decided to check what reviews of working there were like. Seems like Disney does not have an engineering culture and software engineers are at the bottom of the totem pole.
OP on the thread and actually I'm a former disney dev for disneyworld.com. It's a sweat shop. They had me working 100 hours a week the first 4 months I was there. They would order me food so I wouldnt have to leave my desk. Many times I slept under it.
Then I had 6 months of pretty normal hours working on maintenance, then I went back on another project and they had me working 60 - 80 hours (with some 40 and some 100 sprinkled in) for 18 months straight before we finished the project and I bailed.
Great resume builder but be prepared to put in hours.
The US has workers who, on average, work longer hours than anywhere else in the world. Salaries, esp. in STEM, and esp. on the mid-to-high-end, are also wayyy higher than anywhere else.
If you want to make that fat US developer salary be ready to put in the work. Presumably Disney has the money to throw at you via salary... but they're going to get their money's worth.
But aren't these high salaries spent on high living costs as well? Presumably, the places where you make a lot of dev money are also expensive to live at, no?
This kind of makes sense. It isn't their competency. I think it's general advice to never work in a role at a company where that's not their core competency. E.g., engineers are praised at places like Google, etc. Engineers working in entertainment (e.g, Disney) or health care (e.g, Epic Systems) are not as well treated.
Disney has always been about technology. From the animatronics and the other attractions at the theme parks to the engineers at Pixar and LucasFilms.
As I posted above, they own BAMTech, one of the most well respected companies in the streaming infrastructure space.
Building for scale is not hard for good engineers, building for rapid, reliable scale from day one is hard. No one knows how to do it. Building for scale is always about patching holes while you grow slowly.
Even Google doesn’t do big band released like Disney tried to do. They keep things in beta, start off with a limited number of invitations until they work all of the kinks out.
Netflix didn’t become popular overnight. They had time to scale out slowly and on different devices.
Um.. have you ever worked at Disney? It's a great company but having worked there I wouldn't describe it that way.
>> From .. the engineers at Pixar and LucasFilms.
Two visionary companies, staffed by many ex-Disney employees and bought by after their technical innovations were completely mature.
Disney is an amazing company that I respect but having worked there I would say that modern Disney is about brands and family entertainment and they figure out technology when they have to.
How is that different than any other company? When you do otherwise, you end up with Google that just throws a lot of stuff up against the wall and comparatively little sticks or the pre-Jobs 2.0 Apple with the “Advance Technology Group” that couldn’t ship a product if their life depended on it.
They do however treat their creative department very well. Disney is just as IP focused as any tech company. Software has simply never been as important as the story, characters, etc. And honestly they’re doing really well so it’s hard to argue their priorities are wrong.
PS: I have always disliked how they operate, but my sister’s working there making movies. So, I try to keep an open mind.
Disney is no different than any other company as far as how they treat their front line people. They treat their creative people well but they outsource the special effects and much of the non computer animation out to the lowest bidder.
All of the big tech companies with hardware sales and grunt work do the same.
ESPN's streaming is one of the worst ones I've ever used. It is constantly buffering on my 275 Mbps downlink and every other time it has issues with authenticating to my provider.
Wow. That is interesting. I haven't used ESPN's streaming platform in about a year (since they did that switch and stopped including streaming in cable packages). But I used to stream European Soccer games on my second monitor at work virtually every day. My work internet was maybe 75 mbps and it worked fine.
I actually used to have better service when WatchESPN was standalone. When they started integrating into the main ESPN site (and new player) it started declining for me.
Is that the same as ESPN+? I have that (no tv cable package) and haven't had problems buffering and the video seems more crisp than when I had YouTubeTV. Only issue I've come across is that it eats up RAM in Firefox but has no issues in Chrome. Same for NBC Sports Gold.
ESPN and to a lesser extent Hulu have both been riddled with problems for years. ESPN's streaming service is legendary among sports fans for how terrible it is, though it has finally become usable in the last year or two.
YouTube is the only platform that can compare to Netflix on reliability. I'd throw Twitch up there too but their scale is much smaller.
So I do not believe that ESPN or Hulu have the scale numbers of Netflix. Also in the case of ESPN when they do a live stream at scale the method used is much different setup then video on demand. For example, in a live stream because everyone is watching the same thing you can use multicast replication to your edge pop which dramatically lowers BW and overhead. It would be great if it worked to the end user but ISPs are not setup to handle it.
Just checked the numbers: Netflix ~700M, Hulu ~28M, ESPN depending on the source ~6M.
The problem is probably your TV. All TV manufacturers try to get away with the cheapest bill of materials possible for their “smart” components. Roku’s CEO said during a Recode Media interview that it’s their goal to make their platform run well while only adding about $20 to the hardware cost. You really can’t expect much from a low cost streaming stick or the built in components on TVs.
I got two free AppleTV 4K’s by taking advantage of a promotion from DirectTv Now, the difference in performance between them - with an Apple A10x chip - and the built in Roku TV is noticeable.
But if you have a smart TV that’s not a Roku, it’s probably even worse.
If it were the TV, why would the problem only happen with Hulu and not Netflix or any other app?
Also I bought a very expensive TV, and while I didn't dissect it I don't think there are any cheap parts in it - and the reviews all agree it had a top-of-the-line processor at the time and that was only a year ago. I mean it even has glass bezels for the OLED panel.
I don't think anything you say applies to my situation at all. I think Hulu just has some shitty software.
The Hulu Android TV app crashes several times a week for me, and about 25% of inputs are ignored. It used to work just fine, but then they redesigned in a few months ago and it went to shit. The interface got significantly worse as well, why can I only see 3 items at a time when browsing on my 50-something inch TV?
They made that change on Roku 2-3 years ago. Before that you could see 15 or so shows at once, but half the images would get stuck and never actually load. My assumption is they gave up on having a reasonable UI for technical reasons.
Hulu on my Apple TV is excellent - I find the interface to be much less "noisy" than Netflix and I like the large back catalog on a lot shows. Honestly I subscribed for one show (forget what it was now) but found I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.
I constantly am fighting Hulu, the stream will crash. It looses my place, shows like 6 ads and is a pain to seek to the place I was last at. It’s also super jumpy and will jump out of the video if you look at the remote wrong. Such a messed up interface.
I'm not talking about the interface. I mean it literally won't load or crashes regularly. I have fiber internet and no issues with Netflix or any other streaming service.
I'm glad it works for you, but it's pretty awful for me.
yeah, the same happens for me - i have a relatively recent vizio tv, and the hulu app is terrible - video skips and freezes or the whole app crashes. I've taken to just using my mediapc to run hulu in a chrome tab instead. Both devices are hooked to the same ethernet hub, and other things like prime video and netflix run just fine on the vizio.
Keep in mind that the Netflix and Amazon prime apps on the TV work fine. Even the Plex app works well. Just the Hulu app that stinks. I don't disagree that it's likely a tough platform to develop for (and having a htpc is super useful still) but it's really just the Hulu app that is unusable.
Hulu on my Apple TV 4K works great for me. I've been very impressed although I also have a good experience with Netflix and Amazon Prime and I do have a fiber internet connection.
They own Bamtech (came out of MLB and eventually powered ESPN as well as WWE and other properties).
I was having issues this morning but just with home and category pages. The “featured” links to content worked fine, but the index type pages I’m assuming were just getting hammered.
It’s true that getting video “right” can be extremely challenging, but it’s worth noting that Disney has quite significant previous experience here, including at massive scale.
Disney+ operates on top of an expanded MLBAM (BAMTech Media [1]) platform, which has been powering all of ESPNs OTT, Playstatiom Vue, and ran HBO’s OTT offering for a while [2] (Game of Thrones). Disney also opted only to launch in the US, Canada and Netherlands today. So overall, this is still a bit of a botched launch, and the expectation absolutely should have been that they would handle the volume.
It's not the worst idea. If they had performance problems in multiple regions, their engineers would be chasing peak hours around the clock. If they focus on NA first, they can at least get some sleep at the end of the day.
The sad thing is they're having issues with loading login pages, authenticating via API, app API backend routes... pretty much every layer of their app stack and that's _before_ any video can be streamed to end users.
I hoped they would've had the first few layers pretty scalable and load tested, but either they had orders of magnitude more load than they ever planned for, or they didn't actually load test to millions of users (more likely IMO).
Sure, handing over giant checks to Akamai is easy, but it becomes a lot harder if you do the CDN part yourself. Like all the really big streaming video providers do, because otherwise they wouldn't be competitive at scale.
Well, it's not "easy", at Netflix scale. Lots of Netflix traffic is done via local caching servers at ISPs as CDN delivery isn't reliable enough. Minimising playback latency is really, really hard and NF do very well here. Robust geofiltering in those scenarios is hard if you're trying to check the video essence and not just the license.
Having said that, there are a lot of reasonably mature solutions in the market to address many of these points, and it doesn't appear that was the issue yesterday.
Buying Netflix? I think Netflix is going to start a steady decline as the content owners continually pull their stuff from Netflix for their own streaming services. The Netflix original stuff, let's be honest, is hit or miss, with most of the movies being a hard miss.
I don't have much of a problem with Netflix content, but it's the price that just doesn't make sense. They charge extra for UHD, and that premium plan costs more than HBO (which is probably still the king of content quality, though with a crappy 1080p stream) and over twice as much as Disney+ and Apple TV+ (which don't charge extra for UHD).
Agree. I think price are just artificially low because of competition. Of course they are cheaper than Netflix, they are trying to steal market share. We shall see in a few years.
The plan that offers UHD also offer multiple screens. It it is a legitimate way for customers to pay to stream multiple things at the same time. So while it costs around the same as the HBO plan, it offers something that some other services do no. Apple TV+ allows family sharing, but I dont know about Disney+.
Netflix’s multiple screens implementation makes it everyone has access to everyone else’s profile. They should’ve let people link individual Netflix accounts together, but I can see how that can cause fewer possible subscribers if people start sharing.
>. They should’ve let people link individual Netflix accounts together
Spotify does that and it's a complete deal breaker.
I want to log in to all my home devices _once_, with a single account. Not continuously log out and log in and try to type complex passwords with a remote control. I mean, I can't even play different songs on different Google Homes or different TVs with Spotify, unless I sign in with different account on each - and then each device is stuck with a specific set of playlists. Horrible.
Netflix's system has worked out brilliantly for us - we have half a dozen TVs, and any member of the family can watch anything they want on any TV with their own preferences and profiles with minimum hassle.
When's the last time you used Spotify? Honest question, because that's the exact opposite of how Spotify works. You can be logged into as many devices as you want with the same profile, you just can't play simultaneously on each device without setting up profiles. I love that implementation, because it means I can seamlessly transition a song i'm playing on my phone over to another device with the app controls.
What you describe: If you are an individual, ability to login same profile on many devices is sufficient (both netflix & spotify do this).
I'm talking about family use-case with multiple devices.
With Netflix, my wife, myself, our kids, anybody, can click a profile button on any of our devices (TV, tablets, phones, etc) and simply continue watching what they were watching, get their recommendations, etc. Crucially, they can watch different stuff at the same time on living room TV and basement TV, with no hassle.
I have opened support cases and there is currently no way I'm aware of to do that with Spotify. I have Google Homes in all the rooms, and I want to seemlessly play different stuff in different places. To do that, I have to create as many accounts as there are devices (that's a LOT!), AND each device is now locked in to their playlist/song/etc.
The underlying difference of paradigm is:
1. Netflix - single account with multiple soft profiles. You can watch as many streams on same account as you paid for, hassle free
2. Spotify - multiple accounts loosely linked solely for purpose of billing. Each account can not stream multiple places. So if you want to stream something on three devices in parallel, you have to a) Create three accounts; b) log in separately with those accounts in each device.
What when I have dozen devices? (4-6 Google Homes, 6+ tablets and phones)? It is now insane to do anything.
Basically we now exist as isolated islands and have given up on listening to music in kitchen and family room at the same time. This is awful.
I understand why Google works that way since the login is tied to gmail and chrome browser history, but I’m not sure about Spotify. They have a popular Facebook integration but I don’t know if you can get any private info out of the Spotify account.
FYI, the "Standard" Netflix plan offers 2 simultaneous streams in HD for $12.99 per month in the US. The "Premium" plan offers 4 simultaneous streams in UHD for $15.99 per month.
But anyway, I only have one screen, so it's still the case that Netflix charges considerably more just to receive UHD content. As price discrimination goes, that's a pretty scummy way to do it. They've shot and produced this content in UHD, yet they give a much lower quality version to their base customers. I know they have every right to do that, and it might make business sense for them (since people with UHD TVs probably have more disposable income), but it has always felt scummy to me.
Storage and production costs for something available in UHD are the same regardless of whether someone streams a downscaled version. Storing multiple resolutions (assuming they do that rather than downscaling live from the stored highest-res or making the client do it) is where additional costs for more versions would show up.
You need to store downscaled versions anyway for low-bandwidth clients. However, with UHD you also have to store the UHD version, in addition to all the small ones. You also need more storage not just in your own DCs but also in those cache boxes you have at every major ISP; then there's the peering costs for transmitting those UHD videos, etc.
In my view, the "native" format that they produced the content in is the format they should be delivering by default (if supported by the viewer's setup). Of course I recognize that people will disagree, after all, UHD Blu-rays also generally cost more than 1080p Blu-rays. But of course, UHD Blu-rays aren't backwards compatible with standard Blu-ray equipment, so it doesn't feel like an artificial limitation simply for the purpose of price discrimination. This also seems to be a no-brainer for Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and Disney+, which (as far as I can tell) don't have any concept of charging based on video/audio quality.
> This also seems to be a no-brainer for Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and Disney+, which (as far as I can tell) don't have any concept of charging based on video/audio quality.
Almost every other video service globally does, and of those you mentioned Prime's pricing is mostly based on shipping, Apple TV+ at this point is effectively a PR campaign and not a proper service, and Disney+ is running at a massive loss leader to build share.
Netflix isn't charging a sustainable amount of money as it is. You should probably think of it less as charging more for UHD as offering a crazy discount for lower content quality.
It’s common practice for the online video rentals (many different providers including Google and Amazon) to charge more for HD. In reality the marginal cost of providing digital content is almost zero, so there is never going to be “cost-plus” pricing. They are always going to charge whatever the market will bear. Price discrimination allows more value-conscious customers to get content at a lower price than they would otherwise.
They're offering better quality for a higher price. I don't understand why that's "scummy". It's the most honest way to price something.
You could just watch it in regular quality - it's not that bad. Either you feel UHD is worth the extra $3/month (honestly a pittance compared to the price of a UHD TV) or you do not.
In my opinion, HBO's content is rapidly going downhill after the AT&T acquisition. Lots of low budget, high shock value content (violence, nudity, drugs).
I feel like all content is trying to one up each other without substance, as if going off a checklist. But it could also be that I’m getting older and I’ve already seen variations of it so now I’m bored of it.
You can't live on hbo alone. I spent a summer and went through everything I could find. I have no desire to go back for 10 years. They have some great shows but are not creating enough to make netflix output.
> I don't have much of a problem with Netflix content, but it's the price that just doesn't make sense.
Netflix's biggest problem is that they've spent a decade educating customers to expect their service at below cost with an unrealistically low price point funded by debt.
They need to hope the sentiment above isn't too common.
Right, we'll have to see how it goes. The point of buying Netflix would be acquiring its content delivery apparatus and other technical assets, not its subscriber base.
It's possible Disney will get the kinks sorted out and start rolling a good-enough CDN on their own, making the benefit in acquiring Netflix minimal. It'd also make it much cheaper to acquire if they could wait a few quarters for the damage to start showing up on Netflix's balance sheet. But the longer they wait, the longer they deprive themselves of Netflix's best-in-class content delivery network, which already has near-universal penetration.
It's ultimately a question of whether Disney sees a bigger risk in the expenditures necessary to buy up Netflix or the chance that technical issues will continue to haunt the Disney+ ramp-up, leading to a loss in consumer confidence and subsequent retreat back to third-party streaming platforms.
One thing is certain: Disney+ is an existential threat to Netflix, and Netflix's only hope is that the implementation will continue to flop hard enough that consumers lose the appetite for it immediately.
One possible route would be for Netflix to become an infrastructure provider for other streaming services. Essentially a white label streaming video library platform.
Broad device support is also a large factor that favors Netflix. We have children who range from 3-14 and Disney has something for all of them - except support for the devices we have. Our TV is an older (NetCast) LG, we “only” have a Wii-U, and we don’t have old computer hardware just laying around. Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Google Play, YouTube support our TV. Not Disney+. Looks like we’re gonna do our one week and then wait for a while.
> Video is hard to get right, with quirks across many combinations of platform/device/OS/browser version/video card/playback resolution/format features
Video is really hard to get right, a Hollywood-style big bang launch on day 1 is difficult to pull off for any software, let alone video.
I feel for the engineers working there, I wonder what the meetings were like last week, did the engineers know they were not prepared for this?
Came home today, and my wife had Disney + set up and running. Son was watching the awful Phantom Menace movie, and unfortunately it was working like a charm.
Anecdotal, but let's be honest:no matter the problems, Disney can hire talent it needs. Question is whether the corporate culture there can not end up being shitty environment for engineers.
The actual streaming delivery seemed to go okay yesterday, they have enough CDN peering. It was the authentication services that had issues. Those are fairly common day one problems for lots of online services that are fixable.
I'm not sure some day one capacity issues would justify the enormous expensive of buying NF tbh.
Isn't Disney projecting to get like 10-20% of subscribers compared to that of Netflix in five years? Why are people talking like Disney streaming is such a big thing?
There's a weird and recurring anti-Netflix sentiment on here that is rather hard to fathom. Netflix demise has been predicted among the tech community for years now. Keeps growing. As publishers pull content from Netflix, that's more money that Netflix has to entice other publishers and to make their own. I suspect they'll do fine.
Because Disney has a huge back catalog that they can use in the coming years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault) would be one reason for that (and a lot of nostalgia).
A bunch of old movies that everyone has seen a hundred times, probably have on DVD, Blu-ray, and in all likelyhood mp4 form. Eh. The Disney "Vault" thing seems like it's a gimmick that is pretty threadbare now.
With 10% of netflix customers volume but how many will drop netflix of that number for disney? Disney will do fine so will netflix. Plenty of room for both.
Disney has [more] skin in the game now and will always give their own service highly preferential treatment. This isn't just about Mickey Mouse -- Disney owns many other major content producers. Personally, I've been hearing people complain about Disney-owned content disappearing from Netflix for more than a year already.
I'm sure they'll continue to license something to third-party streaming platforms, but they'll do their darnedest to make sure that if consumers are only going to choose one streaming service, it'll be one they control and operate.
It's nothing against Netflix itself -- they're one of the tech companies I admire the most. But they're stuck depending on relatively-short-term license agreements to offer most of the content that people are willing to pay for.
Whether or not the consumer is willing to pay for multiple streaming services, the media companies are going to be much less willing to make the content available outside of their own little streamer. This means rough seas ahead for Netflix.
Disney+ is arguably the largest software release of all time in terms of scale. My estimate is that they will be handling 1-2% of all internet traffic by the end of the week.
I can't think of a launch of this scale that has gone smoothly. Modern console releases, AAA games with online multiplayer, Pokemon Go, healthcare.gov... all cases where organizations literally have billions in cash. It does not matter how much money you have or how great your engineering team is - you can't go scale 0 to 100 on launch day.
I've never handled a project like this, but I feel like the goal should be to meet what average demand will be once the high demand of the first few days goes down. No one is going to remember that they couldn't login to Disney+ on the first day as long as the experience on the second and going forward is strong.
Plus, its free press. "Disney+ so popular at launch it was hard to get into for a couple hours." Meanwhile, as people are getting home from work and reading that headline, and Disney+ now works.
OK - so if it is so obvious that you can't scale from 0 to 100 on launch day, why not anticipate that?
I imagine the gigantic Arctic cold front passing over the East Coast right now created a much larger demand than they were expecting on a non-holiday Tuesday morning while school is (supposed to be) in session.
Agreed. One of the reasons why maybe they didn’t that is because someone thought “we gotta get out those big series everything is expecting like Mandalorian out, and we can’t release it first on Denmark and not the US”, which someone probably replied “why don’t we launch in Denmark without any big names” which got laughed at because then none would want to sign up for it.
The tension between Marketing and Engineering makes another victim.
I believe Google specifically fight against this by mandating every project to have an insane scalable architecture from the get go. You can’t be Google and fail at that when you sell your infra to corporations promising that won’t be a problem. Someone at Disney+ probably made a calculated bet that if they can solve the problem soon, none will care about this in a few weeks.
It breaks when you hit the main CTA button to start a free trial now. I don’t understand how a company with billions of dollars in resources can fail to solve such a well trodden problem. Even if there were a billion users on day 1. I wonder if the problem is due to an abdication of parts of the engineering problem, an over reliance on 3rd party services, that meant that no-one in the engineering team was able to study the whole engineering problem from first principles, which would result in inadequate fail overs.
There's a gigantic arctic front moving across most of the US East coast right now. Thousands of schools and businesses are closed due to the weather.
The point of launching on a Tuesday morning was to test out the system with a small audience ahead of Thanksgiving, or even the weekend, when they would properly expect to be slammed. But due to the weather, they're getting slammed by all the people stuck at home with nothing else to do.
'No plan survives contact with the enemy', means you need an adaptable system to succeed. The way you use it though, it's like you are saying 'expect to fail'.
I interviewed with them and no, they do not pay all that well, and their recruiter was pretty upfront about disclosing that early in the process.
Additionally, I've hired a candidate that had an offer in hand from Disney+ and we were easily able to outbid them, (I was at a non-FAANG company at the time)
Disney is notorious for paying below-market rates. There's a massive supply of naive vict--err, candidates-- sufficiently enamored with the idea of working at a well-loved cultural touchstone that they'll jump at the opportunity for almost any salary.
It usually doesn't take too long for employees to be disabused of their childhood hopes and dreams, but it's often a very painful process, and there are always some diehards who never seem to be able to let go. I lived less than a mile from the Magic Kingdom for about four years and saw this process play out many times.
Most people burn out and learn that maybe working on a boring business backend isn't that bad after all, but there's always a huge line of wide-eyed candidates eager to backfill. Companies that fit this profile never learn to treat employees well because, frankly, they don't have to. The same thing happens in games.
I also strongly doubt you can simply bootstrap a Netflix caliber development team, no matter how much you spend. I have no doubt that the people who came up with Disney+ had no concept of this.
Disney acquired a team for this, BAMtech, which had successfully run the infrastructure for MLB, HBO Now, WWE, among others. Certainly none of those were near as large as this, but they should have had the experience to know what works without needing to bootstrap.
DirectvNow and MGo would beg to differ. Hulu should be much bigger considering their catalog but their app is terrible to point of being almost unusable.
I have to agree with sterileopinions here. The fact that it's been done multiple times before means you know a lot about how hard it will be, the necessary resources, and can learn from past mistakes.
That doesn't make it easy. But it definitely makes it easier. To say otherwise is to argue that experience isn't useful.
> The fact that it's been done multiple times before means you know a lot about how hard it will be, the necessary resources, and can learn from past mistakes.
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
It’s an ‘embarrassingly parallel’ problem. They could use a test load of a 1000 accounts, design a service for that, buy a sufficient proxy host and multiply. Scaling is hard when the problem is difficult to scale, browsing and streaming media is not a hard class of problem to scale, unlike an MMO say where real-time content updates occur in intricate patterns of locality and game logic.
> 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.
This would seem a fair assessment if it were not for my experience using Disney Life, their old streaming service. It has been out for years and is generally terrible.
- App is incredibly slow and takes ages to load. Worst on Kindle Fire and older devices (Netflix/Prime video work fine)
- sometimes a download film will just stop working and crash the device when you try to open it. Only way to fix is to delete the whole app and reinstall. Deleting only the download does not work.
- downloads are huge regardless of device/connection, appears to be no intelligent bandwidth usage.
- logs you out on every single update of the app or operating system (pain on Apple TV where it auto updates every minor version)
- logging back in requires you to go to their website rather than be able to do it on the device.
- never remembers where you are in a film properly
- interface on Apple TV is impossible to use (partly Apple TV controllers fault though)
Yet I still subscribe, because the content itself is great.
I logged in early this morning and nothing was working but it was up an running within maybe an hour. It's almost more impressive that they had an unintended service interruption so quickly and recovered right away.
But these guys knew the kind of volume they would have on Day 1, and have the resources to get it right, and the brand value to protect. It’s not like a startup that grows like crazy.
This could have been avoided if the service was introduced slowly. Big launch days planned months in advance don't really play well with software development reality.
It is difficult to built software at scale without having all those users to provide for the load.
They could start with small number of people and get more by invitation. This could have been done before all scaling effort.
Not surprising at all, what is surprising to me is that companies still insist on doing the "Big Reveal" style launches. Why not open it up gradually in phases via a beta program or something?
They did that to some extent. I've had Disney+ for about a month now. But going from a few people in a small country to a billion people all at once is still a massive change.
Meh, this was easily prevented simply by not promoting it so much. They should have done a staggered rollout country by country starting with the smaller countries and adding on a country or two every day.
I've been using Disney+ since they pre-launced in the Netherlands for the last ca. 2 months IIRC, without any issue what so ever.
But then again: NL is a small country.
I've had issues getting it to Chromecast. Fortunately they released the app for Samsung TVs last week. That helps a lot. Now there's only the issue that that app was suddenly logged out for no clear reason. Let's hope that doesn't happen again.
> "Disney has estimated it will need to attract at least 60 million subscribers, putting it on a par with Netflix, in order for Disney+ to break even."
How's that for a barrier to entry? I don't doubt that they will be able to hit it, but it's still a mind-bogglingly high number. I think that's part of why I'd like to see Netflix's continued success - competition is a good thing, and if they were to ever go under I doubt we'd see a replacement.
Netflix has ~160 million subscribers. So, they're saying they need to be a third of the size of Netflix to break even. Since "break even" isn't all that interesting to investors, for it to be profitably worthwhile, I'd imagine they need to essentially become as big as Netflix.
It seems unclear how feasible that may be. The only thing keeping me wanting to use Netflix is quality content, which has been in decline recently. Given all of the recognizable brands under the Disney name, maybe people will switch. At a technical level, I question their ability to pull off offering a service as large as Netflix with high availability. Netflix offers very competitive compensation to their engineering talent.
The main cost for Netflix is content, not engineering. They spend billions developing new shows. Disney has tons of existing material they can just monetize, so huge advantage there.
"Disney has tons of existing material they can just monetize"
To be clear, Disney is pulling the content from existing monetizations -- including Netflix -- to try to monetize it on their own platforms. This isn't free real estate. There is a very real cost.
And Netflix is going to put the money they aren't paying Disney to produce their own content and buy up other content.
Good point. Disney is primarily a content creation company, not a technical infrastructure company. According to other subthreads in this discussion, they treat engineers as second-class employees, requiring insane work hours for little pay. If they actually want to compete with Netflix, they have to run Disney+ as a real tech company, not as something they do on the side.
Disney+ can be a fantastic success if Disney gets it right, because they do have lots of excellent content. But if they don't take the engineering side seriously, it's going to fail.
If Disney just wanted to focus on making good movies and TV shows, which clearly is what they're best at, dealing with Netflix would have been perfect for them. If they want to be a tech company instead, they really need to follow through and commit to that.
Disney is in a tough spot since they also pay dividends. Companies typically don't ever reduce their dividends, which leaves Disney unable to spend that cash on their growth.
Disney isn't going to be able to sustain the subscriber numbers they want just by offering their back catalog, regardless of how good it is. They need to constantly release new content to keep people hooked, and shows like The Mandalorian and all the MCU ones are going to be as expensive to produce as what Netflix spends.
And from the look of it, EVERYTHING is there. So far only a couple of things I haven't been able to find, which were either super-niche (an old Christmas sing-along video I watched as a kid), or Song of the South.
On the engineering compensation factor, I interviewed with BAMTech (the successor to MLB [Major League Baseball] Advanced Media and the underlying video streaming platform for Disney) a few years ago. Their comp was considerably lower than Netflix. I got the impression they expected you to be willing to work for less because you were working on something related to MLB.
> willing to work for less because you were working on something related to MLB
This part I don't get. The intersection of people who love MLB but are the best talent you're looking for, may not be aligned. If you want great engineers, you shouldn't care whether or not they particularly like MLB. It's a weird hiring funnel. Not all projects demand the best talent, but if Disney Plus wants 60 million subscribers, they should be poaching Netflix, or at least hiring that level of talent.
I'm sure this depends on the team, but I've actually heard from someone who works there that Netflix views working overtime consistently as a red flag? As in, everyone is supposed to be a superstar engineer, and not being able to finish your work in 9-5 makes you look bad?
I can't speak for everyone at Netflix, and as you mention it may depend on the team, but in my team I don't think anyone cares. Why should it matter how many hours someone works a week, as long as they do a good job overall?
A key thing drawing me from Netflix to Disney+ is that the latter is willing to actually just give me lists A-Z of all available shows and movies. I'm sure there have to be others who feel the same way.
Yeah, what is it with Netflix and making it impossible to find something to watch anymore? It's like you open it up and not only do all the lists change and it's not easy to find things, but they also run around changing the cover images of the series you've been watching so you don't even recognize it at first and you're hunting around to find it again.
They are clearly engaging in user hostile behavior hoping that the number of users who cancel due to being inconvenienced is less than the number who are retained/gained by being fooled into thinking there is more than there is.
I mean I think it’s more over engineering idiocy. I was staying with my cousin for a week and Was amazed at the content Netflix recommends/ surfaces him versus me. So much cool stuff that he had, versus the relative genre stuff I get in my own account
Do you know whose account is older, yours or your friend's? I'm wondering if their algorithm thinks it knows you well and thinks you won't like these shows and maybe your friend's account is newer so it tries to experiment more?
Originally, on AppleTV, when I opened the app, the first thing I’d click would let me resume watching what I was watching previously. Then, one day, it changed so they I had to scroll up or down to find the row of “continue watching”, and it wasn’t even one row up or down, I had to make an effort to look for it.
I would assume this was due them wanting me to see what else they had, or maybe feel like having to scroll would make it seem like they had a lot. Or maybe it was incompetence. Either way, I saw no reason for them to inconvenience me, so I canceled Netflix.
Our smart TV lets us swap between our five (!) profiles. Each has different trackings and recommendations (other than Star Trek TNG, which apparently three of us have watched ;)) You might consider making a new profile ("cududa2" or something) and see if that has more diverse recommendations. Try adding / watching some of the ones that are novel compared to your other list, and see if that helps.
I agree, though, I'd really like to have a _full listing_ of shows.
The Netflix UX is a balancing act between finding things that you know you want to watch and "discovering" new content to watch.
Netflix faces the same challenge that Facebook does with the news feed in that they're trying to combine two functions into the one interface that the users are familiar with.
I don't know when product managers are going to realize that one size doesn't fit all. Different people use Netflix differently and usually even the same people use it differently at different times. There should be an option to switch between these modes.
Netflix, for example, could easily have multiple modes. A discover based on my past preferences/popularity mode and a categorical listing mode. The problem is them blending these two together and then prioritizing their content arbitrarily over other better recommendations.
The home page is for discovery based on your past preferences/popularity. And there are TV and movie pages in which you can display shows by genre or even A-Z.
Disclosure: I work at Netflix and would like to make it better for everyone who uses it.
How do we access these other modes? I've never noticed it on either the Windows app, nor my Android device -- despite spending several minutes looking for it right now, after reading your comment that they exist.
When I go to Hamburger -> Anime, or Hamburger -> TV shows, it has the same style of semi-logical groupings of categories as I see normally: Crime shows, action shows, classic shows, suggestions for me, etc -- but there seems to be no affordances to affect ordering, nor menu items that would reflect that. The settings menu is useless, as it consists only of links to the account details, privacy statement, and terms of use.
I really hope that the answer isn't "Log into our website instead of using our native app!", though perhaps the feature warrants such an experiment.
In the Android mobile app, which has recently seen some excellent improvements, I'm unable to find an alphabetical listing as well. One can select genres, and TV shows vs movies, but there are no affordances for sorting, only a wall of categories to scroll through.
Huh, you are correct, never realized that was possible. You have to dig a little to get to it (change view format and then select from sorting options) but it's there.
Netflix is trying to draw your attention away from the fact that they are constantly losing licensed content by conditioning you to expect a random assortment on each open. Because Disney owns its content they want to condition you to trust that the content you want is always there whenever you want to watch it. The UXs match the business models.
Specifically, they are trying to (a) spam you with Netflix options to find some Netflix content that you will get hooked on so you stop looking for non-Netflix content, and (b) give you the appearance of inifinite available content by making the content you haven't watched look different every time you see the cover image. The mistake is in breaking the illusion by also rotating the cover look of content you've already watched.
As well as the annoyance of snippet videos auto-playing as you're trying to browse titles, without an explicit user action for "show me a snippet of this".
Check out Reelgood [1]. It aggregates all of the streaming services and allows you to filter on genre, IMDB, and Rotten Tomatoes. I don't have to waste time looking through a bunch of junk to find something worth watching anymore.
That looks interesting. I've been using instantwatcher for a while. It does Netflix well. The Amazon side is frightening in the amount of 'content' they host and I guess the API for Amazon Prime doesn't break things into usable subcategories as well as Netflix.
Netflix has had A-Z sort for years. On web, click on TV Shows / Movies, then click on the four box icon, and then change it from 'suggestions for you' to 'A-Z' or 'Z-A'.
When I scroll, it won’t show me anything past the letter K. It’s also displays a grid of boxes with artwork instead of a simple easy-to-scan text list.
From third party sites that index Netflix content, looks like they have a little under 3000 movies, most of which I’ve never heard of.
Versus Disney+, which seems to have over 600 movies with quite a few big titles.
You know you're screwing up UX when just pulling an 8 or 9 year old copy out of the repo, making it pass tests, then deploying, would result in an immediate, massive improvement.
Though as other commenters note, making the interface nicer for the user is, apparently, contrary to their interests, or they'd stop doing the exact opposite so much.
This is a myth that needs to die, for the sake of frugality and for the sake of open culture that Disney is trying to hostile takeover via copyright abuse.
They do. Kids-wise, we'd be fine without Disney+ and Netflix. My youngest is a big fan of Thomas the Tank Engine, but even on Youtube, he doesn't want to see the actual Thomas shows, but videos of people playing with Thomas toys. No idea why this is such a popular thing, but my oldest watched people play Mario at that age. And now he watches people play Minecraft.
I don't get it. Go play these things yourself, but apparently kids love to watch others play, and there's tons and tons of that on Youtube.
Likely a calculation of break-even with lost licensing revenue. The Disney+ adventure is a risk because you're foregoing easy licensing money for hard product money, and gambling that it'll be worth it.
Above all, Disney+ is an attempt to reclaim the massive royalties Disney was reaping from every cable subscription that carried ESPN. Almost a quarter of The Walt Disney Company's revenue originated from ESPN in 2015-ish (which was the last time I looked), making it neck-and-neck with Parks and Resorts for Disney's most valuable business unit. Cord-cutting was a serious risk to them then and I'm sure they've only felt the sting more over the last five years.
Ding ding ding, I think this is the only way how this kind of calculation makes any sense at all: they are expecting Disney+ to replace all the cable revenue they lost, and until then, it's not "break even".
Because it sure as hell is not the opportunity costs of having their content on their own streaming service. Like Toy Story 4 released months ago, did a billion in cinema, but they still won't have it on Disney+ until.. somewhere in 2020. Their version of "betting the company" is "all the stuff you used to have on Netflix, but now you are paying extra".
Disney was (and presumably still is) collecting tens of dollars per month for every cable subscription that has access to ESPN (the number I remember reading was something like $23 but that may be incorrect). Since ESPN is included in most cable subscriptions, virtually every cable subscription cancelled is an immediate revenue loss for TWDC.
I think the traditional media companies will be happy enough if all of the streaming companies fail due to fragmentation and they can ramrod cable back down everyone's throats. Even a streaming failure might be a win for traditional media companies. It might even be the biggest win, honestly. I don't know, but it seems like there was more money in traditional media than in streaming. The brief point in time where everyone was paying for both was probably ideal. But now that a sizable portion of the population have cut out $100+ cable bills (plus cable ads) in favor of 1-3 $10 streaming subscriptions (without ads) makes it seem like traditional media was way more profitable.
Honestly, I want it to be more like Music. I can choose whichever streaming music company I want and get 99.9% of the same music, because they have standard fees they pay each other, etc.
Streaming Video is incredibly fragmented. It's honestly frustrating. I don't want to subscribe to 5 services. I currently have Hulu+Live, and it has ESPN, and lots of other channels I like, but doesn't have the local Fox station, or the local ABC station (only the national fox news and abc news).
Excessive Fragmentation is going to cause everyone to go back to pirating stuff, like they did before Netflix made it too cheap and easy to bother.
Having your show streamed on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney+ and others at the same time would make you more money than having it streamed only on your single service.
They are all playing to kill Netflix and other competition so they can establish monopoly like they had on cable.
I bought an HD antenna that gave me roughly 20 local channels with crystal clear picture and no buffering for $28 - no subscription. I'd highly recommend it for cord cutters to augment their streaming with local news and sports on national tv (world series, super bowl, sunday night football, etc).
If you live in a metro area with good signal, you can actually use a metal paperclip as a functional antenna. I picked up over 20 channels this way, no extra antenna needed.
I haven't figured out how they will dig themselves out of the hole of not being ubiquitous like Netflix. I'm a prime candidate for buying their service (small children who are definitely going to be missing some of the Disney content they've previously gotten on Netflix) but as far as I can tell, I have no options to subscribe on my two smart TV devices (Roku and Samsung). I'm sure as heck not buying another device just for them.
I actually went looking for an app on the Samsung app store and found several Disney-branded things that just added to my confusion. One seemed to be streaming TV but 1) it didn't seem to have any recent content, and 2) when I tried it, it wanted me to sign in with my "local TV provider", which just makes me shake my head.
My initial experience as a willing consumer doesn't give me much hope they're gonna pull this off...
Not being on Roku's kinda weird, as it's hugely popular, widely deployed, and sees high usage. It's an odd platform but if your product is a video streaming catalogue + service well, that's exactly what it's built to do and getting that going's not all that hard.
But maybe they're looking for access to whatever special SDK the big boys (Netflix, Google) get so they can make their branding folks happy (more consistency with experience on other platforms). I'd imagine developing with that's more involved.
Samsung, some kind of custom Android probably? TV operating systems are a pain in the ass to test, fairly expensive to develop for, and relatively bad at drawing actual usage no matter how widely they're deployed. Might be the delay there. Big enough service needs to pay attention to that junk eventually, but I could see them dropping that for launch.
I'd be curious how projections were calculated and what the timeline is to get to 60 mill for this calculation. Seems like adhering to business as usual is a slow but profitable death for their home video / TV department.
Hulu is primarily owned by Comcast (afaik Disney only has a minority stake). After Disney's acquisition of 21st Century Fox last year, Comcast and Disney own the vast majority of what people consider AAA entertainment content.
Assuming Disney+ finds its footing, the stage is set for a Hulu/Disney+ duopoly. Comcast and Disney will starve Netflix, Amazon, et al for popular content, while simultaneously bleeding them on exorbitant license fees for the minimal selection they'll be willing to offer.
Instead of switching between Netflix and Amazon Video, most consumers will switch between Hulu for Comcast-owned content (Universal, NBC, others) and Disney+ for Disney-owned content (Disney, ABC, Fox, Pixar, and many more). Netflix subscriptions will lapse accordingly.
Meet the new boss -- same as the old boss. About the only way this is better for the consumer than the old-school cable setup is that municipalities won't be signing exclusive contracts with cable cos barring any competition for decades-long periods of time.
Thanks for the correction. It seems this became the case with the acquisition of Fox, since Hulu was apparently 1/3 owned by Disney, 1/3 Fox, 1/3 Comcast. With Disney outbidding Comcast for Fox, they became 2/3 owners and Comcast decided that it made sense to exit.
I think the ultimate reality still stands, just s/Hulu/TBD Streaming/g. Comcast will roll their own competitor at some point. Rent-by-mail is one thing, but when it's just moving bits around, it doesn't make sense to outsource to a licensee like Netflix anymore.
Unless Netflix can figure out how to lobby and legislate with the same supreme competence they apply to systems engineering, their long-term prospects as an independent entity are bleak. The copyright regime will be their downfall.
Comcast has multiple competitors already out in the wild.
First they have XFinity Flex. Their competitor to Roku.
Then they have Peacock, which at the moment looks like a competitor to CBS All Access. Coming soon.
Somewhere in between a channel and a platform you have Live TV broadcast. Who knows how they will brand it in the long run (they will want you to pay for their variant of "cable service / satellite".) ATM they have the Xfinity Stream Beta App on Roku.
They also have the NBC Family of streaming apps: bravo, e!, nbc, oxygen, syfy, telemundo, universo, usa. They would absolutely benefit from a single "guide" interface like ATT TV Now/ / PlutoTV.
Disney+ also has a bundle offer for Hulu, and ESPN+ as a trio. Disney just recently reassured shareholders that Hulu was their focus for all of Disney's less "family friendly/family focused" content (Miramax, much of the Fox catalogs), including that the FX/FXX content programming team is moving into building Hulu Originals in addition to cable content. Disney seems keen on differentiating Hulu enough from Disney+ that they may not cannibalize the Hulu audience that much. (Probably the thing for Hulu to worry about much more than Disney+ is the expiration of their deal for Comcast/NBC Universal content in 2025, and the ghostly specter of whatever weird plans Comcast has for "Peacock".)
From people that work at Hulu, the current strategy is for Hulu to remain the live-streaming/online DVR option for broadcast shows, and to be the sreaming platform for experimental and adultish fare like Always Sunny, with Disney+ remaining the family-friendly/mainstream/prestige streaming platform in the Disney suite.
It also mentions that Disney has asked Fox Searchlight to consider more of its project slate for Hulu Original instead of theaters, which aligns with how much Netflix and Amazon have been investing in independent films for (nearly) straight to streaming distribution.
One thing I haven't heard is how DisneyLife fits into this. I use it at the moment for my kids and it has all the stuff you expect from Disney, basically the animated movies like a Frozen and Moana.
The service is terrible, often breaks, and has an undocumented but necessary auth code step, with the added gotcha that the ui covers over the code sometimes. The ui is also terrible, who would make it so the next episode of a series doesn't come on by itself? Children are the target audience.
Anyway why wouldn't they either fix up what they've got, or use the lessons so that they don't get a meltdown on the first day?
Also does anyone know whether this was outsourced to say Accenture? It really feels like it.
Hello! Former engineering director for DisneyLife here. Most of the team wasn't allowed to move to Disney+ and have since moved on. The DisneyLife journey would make a great book, but doesn't really fit into a HN comment.
FWIW, DisneyLife was built by a team smaller than most YC startups. The core technology for DRM/streaming was licensed by another company. When BAM was purchased, the entire product got outsourced. The auth was a central service that we didn't own but were required to use. When I left, we had autoplay of next episodes.
Have you ever considered writing a blog about your experiences there? What little you did write here in the response about DisneyLife is actually how I think Disney+ is going to turn out (small team, underfunded, demoralized, forced to license 3rd rate tech based on external mandates, etc).
Maybe one day when I can feel more analytical about it. This is a weird day for me, as you can imagine. Also, lots of people I know and like have put a lot of time into Disney+. I don't want to take away from what they're trying to accomplish right now.
Is Disney+ the same tech as DisneyLife? For what it’s worth my daughter loves DisneyLife and I also enjoyed being able to watch the classics so thanks very much for your work.
Some of the central services are, but most of it was redone by BAM...especially the streaming infrastructure. I don't know where they host. Last I heard, they still used their own metal. I have to imagine that changed.
The DisneyLife browse experience was built on Google Cloud using App Engine in Python.
Long story short, Disney has a policy about such things. You'll find yourself logged out of most Disney services on the same cadence. I believe this was never an issue before us because most Disney services you log in for aren't daily use, such as buying park tickets. That may have changed for Disney+. We all knew it was a huge pain point in the UX.
Wouldn't the moral choice be to just not watch? Isn't piracy stealing? Morally: don't buy it, don't steal it and also don't view it. Reward other content providers and reduce the relevance of Disney.
I would happily download a car: zero cost reproduction of useful things makes society as a whole richer. The content industry needs to figure out a new business model to adapt to the information age, and the longer people pay for digital content the more funds these outdated relics will have for legislating a moat around their "property". I'd much prefer a kickstarter or patreon-like model where superfans could fund and watch and participate in development.
You're correct, but it's worse than theft. When you steal a car, just that car is stolen. Piracy devalues the original product...something theft can't really ever do.
"I would happily download a car: zero cost reproduction of useful things makes society as a whole richer."
But how much did it cost to produce the first car? and do you actually think anyone would put that much time and effort into the first car if they didn't a way to make a profit or at least their money back? In your world, technology will only go so far..which is a disservice to humanity.
"The content industry needs to figure out a new business model to adapt to the information age"
They have: streaming services. Your mentality is why we will only have services that we pay for in the future and won't be able to install software or get a Blue ray.
"I'd much prefer a kickstarter or patreon-like model where superfans could fund and watch and participate in development."
Which wouldn't even get close to the amount of money needed to develop this kind of content.
You aren't being rebellious. You are just giving excuses as to why you would rather just download something for free instead of paying for it.
I remember in the 90s the excuse du jour for music piracy was that it would help independent artists. It's only made it so most independent artists can't really make a living anymore and pushed everything to large corporations.
Culture is public. By arguing that it should be privately owned, you are effectively saying that poor people shouldn't be allowed to participate.
Disney's business model has been destroying the potential of thousands of great artists who failed to reach cultural relevancy because their parents were barely making ends meet and couldn't afford to buy in, and the cultural language is now locked behind a gate with a toll (if it can be licensed at all).
Why are the greedy profit motivations of a giant multinational corporation more important to you than poor children's cultural participation? You aren't being a rational realist, you are just being selfish and classist.
Disney built their business on the back of the public domain. Every single great movie they made builds off the work of others. Now they are trying to silo these once-free properties behind IP laws to shut the door behind themselves.
Can you name single great work of art created by Disney that isn't mostly derivative? Reflect on why you can't: they are monetizers of existing culture, not creators of originality.
> Can you name single great work of art created by Disney that isn't mostly derivative? Reflect on why you can't: they are monetizers of existing culture, not creators of originality.
You sort of have a point, since this is Disney we're considering, but this is a slippery slope.
Most _everything_ is derivative work.
Should I pirate all commercial software that's powered by open source software?
Should I never pay for a modern book with a hero's journey storyline simply because it's not original?
And I shouldn't pay artists for their covers or remixes of other songs? So unoriginal.
And why should I buy tickets to any new Batman movie? Batman's part of our culture and the story is probably taken from the comics.
And I should never profit from my business unless it's MY original idea.
If you dislike Disney (for good reason), then boycott them. But that doesn't give you the _right_ to pirate their content nor should you encourage others to pirate.
You should pirate content that you want to consume without supporting the creators.
If Disney only made derivative movies and didn't lobby to to make IP laws more strict and punitive, I would not think it was immoral to give them your money.
Consumers should consider paying for IP an investment in the creator's future work. If a creator made something you enjoy, fill their pockets so they can make another great thing. If the creator is known to damage society with their profits, giving them money should be avoided.
Does paying for (before viewing) vs pirating a Disney film have any meaningful effect on the quality of future films?
The current system optimizes for movies that look good in a 30-second trailer, because you can't get your money back if the movie is bad. If you really like a movie you pirated, you should buy it to send the signal. I'd argue paying for any movie before you see it contributes to the decline of film as art we've seen in the past ~3 decades.
> You should pirate content that you want to consume without supporting the creators.
I wonder how it is to feel so entitled that you see nothing wrong with this - to think that you deserve that content and that all the cast and crew deserve nothing in return.
> the decline of film as art we've seen in the past ~3 decades.
You must also have a very narrow definition of art to believe this.
Crew never gets residuals from major motion pictures.
Actor residuals are often pretty paltry if they get any, unless they are a huge name.
The people you care about have already been paid - almost always at a flat rate.
Director and writers get some residuals, typically in the 3-5% range.
Vast majority of what you're paying goes straight to the movie studios. Some of that is banked for future productions. Much of it is pocketed by execs like Harvey Weinstein.
I would love to see reform in movie financing make more of the results of a film's success end up in the pockets of creatives, but that isn't how the industry works currently.
I think there is a great opportunity for a startup in patreon's footsteps that allows an audience to 'tip' the cast and crew directly, bypassing the studios. I think the 'leaderboards' of what films/roles get the most tips would be a much better signal of quality than most film review aggregation sites or the Oscars. Would also be cool to be able to sort films by donations to specific roles, ex. set design, costuming, lighting, FX etc.
"Culture is public. By arguing that it should be privately owned, you are effectively saying that poor people shouldn't be allowed to participate."
There are plenty of options, like going to your public library, that don't involve copyright infringement.
How are poor children able to download a movie illegally from the Internet, yet can't don't have any money to purchase it legally?
"Why are the greedy profit motivations of a giant multinational corporation more important to you than poor children's cultural participation? You aren't being a rational realist, you are just being selfish and classist."
You could say the same thing about anything: you are depriving a poor family a home if they can't move into yours without paying you, you greedy classist!
"Disney built their business on the back of the public domain. Every single great movie they made builds off the work of others."
Yet, the public domain movie wasn't nearly as popular nor do we even remember them. This means they added value. You also failed to mention all of the jobs Disney provides. Should all of these people be deprived a living (and possibly lose their homes?
"Can you name single great work of art created by Disney that isn't mostly derivative? Reflect on why you can't: they are monetizers of existing culture, not creators of originality."
Can you name the original works? If not, they probably weren't that good.
Any personal photos you and your family take are part of culture. Should they be public or do you get to decide?
Much of culture is private.
Poor people not participating in Disney content doesn't take into account the content on public tv or libruaries that will loan dvds either. The price of a month of Disney+ will make things cheaper as well.
That's not how it works, copyright doesn't protect privacy, those are two separate things.
Disney is a company that took folk stories that lived in public domain, packaged it and released as their own. That's ok, the works were public domain anyway.
The problem is that after that, they continue to lobby in a way that no future works will ever enter public domain.
Our constitution says that copyright needs to expire, there is a loophole though, because it doesn't say when it should expire, so every time Mickey Mouse copyright is about to expire they lobby the congress to extend it further.
The copyright originally lasted 10 years, now it's 120 years after author's death.
Piracy doesn't devalue it increases the value. It creates growth and spreads word of mouth. The correct ratio of piracy to purchased copies will make a worthless product into a successful one.
Independent music was more popular in the early 2000s when piracy was high. You share music for it to be successful. With streaming independent music gets lost and crowded out if it exists on the platform.
Patreon and kickstarter models function based on closed-off perks for the supporters, not just superfans ready to give money for no reason. This is reliant on some protection for those perks, otherwise there is no reason for that model.
The idea that piracy isn't stealing is nonsense. Why don't you try creating something, then having someone rip it off against your will, plaster it all over their ad-supported platform and flip you the bird when you ask for a share of proceeds.
Early access seems to be a pretty common model, which I think is pretty effective.
I like that as a minimally-coercive incentive: everyone gets access, but you can pay to access it a week sooner. This is the most common model used by Youtubers AFAICT.
I have had my content "stolen". Someone in China likely made more off the game I wrote than I did: good for them, I would have never been able to reach that market. I was focused on making a quality web-game and they iframed it with ads. Didn't hurt me a bit - even helped a bit because I continued getting analytics from these new users. My inability to create a self-perpetuating monetization strategy for my game does not mean that I'm owed anything: if people donated more I would have worked on it longer, but they didn't so I didn't. Fond memories for everyone involved.
I view the idea that "nobody should be able to make money from the fruits of my labor" rooted in pettiness and insecurity. If you can consistently create good things at a good pace, people will support you. I didn't meet that bar, got a 'real' job, and that's fine.
The idea that a single work of creation should be able to support someone for years (or even the rest of their lives) is a fantasy that only entered the public zeitgeist in the past few decades: I suspect largely as the result of IP trolls like Disney, MPAA and RIAA.
I agree. I think the segment of people who are willing to pay full price but pirate purely for financial reasons is vanishingly small.
Most pirates are trying content they would not be willing to buy, which expands the market for most content (provided that content hasn't already been carpetbombed via ads across many media channels so most people already know about it).
Big kickstarters often send out physical goods as rewards. In general, the rewards on both platforms are only interesting to superfans in the first place, whether they're physical or digital. It would be impossible to measure, but I can't imagine it's that common for those exclusive rewards to be pirated, or for someone to decide not to give money because they can get the restricted content for free.
If your argument is that both theft and piracy make the "owner" of the "property" feel bad, then I don't think that really proves they're the same thing. Neither does the fact that in both cases, someone who did not create the product is profiting from it; it's not a zero-sum game, their profit isn't equal to your loss.
I agree with the philosophy. But look: MS, ORACLE, Disney all produce easily replicatable product. And currently, laws and licensing they sell under say, effectively, pay us.
If you take the thing they want to legally charge for then that is theft.
And if what you want is a new model in a brave New world then one must take the effort. Be the change you want to see. Not by simply stealing from those you disagree with, philosophically, but by disregarding them completely. And then rewarding those that also participate in your same perspective.
It's hard. But I can't justify theft just caused they're assholes. Eventually everyone's the asshole.
That’s if you believe that Disney properly owns the material it has claimed.
If you believe that the default ownership rights to culture already belong to everyone, pirating isn’t theft, it’s a refusal to be deprived of a natural right.
I'm fine with the effort they go to to defend Mickey Mouse. Other than Steamboat Willie (which I haven't actually seen) and Fantasia, I can't name any other appearances of his, but he's still Kardashian-famous. This is only because Disney built him up as a brand and continues investing in him, and he's synonymous with Disney. Outside of fair use and parody, Disney has earned the right to use that IP as they please.
Tangential, but does anyone know of good hardware to function as a standalone HDMI output video server? I've been wanting to play with making a 'plug and play' box that I could give to kids/grandparents in my life who don't have the technical skills to pirate for themselves, preloaded with content I think is good and they'd enjoy.
What is the cheapest hardware that can output arbitrary 1080p video over HDMI at a good frame-rate? Bonus points for having a good chunk of integrated storage and/or bundled with remote control. I bought one of those cheap tiny PCs but the video card wasn't up to the task.
Google ChromeCast is the usual solution for this. ~$50, the size of a hockey puck, needs a phone-charger for a power plug, and does HDMI-out.
Turns your TV into a YouTube/Netflix/Spotify/Hulu, and the remote-control is your phone.
If by "arbitrary 1080p content", you mean a collection of media files of your own, I'd get a Raspberry Pi 3B+ kit for $50, plug in a large external HDD or two, and setup a Plex server.
Arguably, buying a smart tv is the cheapest way to go.
There is the Pi 4, which once all the parts and shipping are put together about $80. Though, eh.. imho it's better if you get one of the Intel Nucs. They can be had for around $200 and are quite good.
Why make it nasty like that? If you’ve got a moral objection why do you need to criticise them personally like that as well? I don’t understand why people feel the need to be so aggressive.
> Make the moral choice and pirate their content instead of giving them your money to fund further overreach.
I was going to pirate The Mandalorian because "Sorry, Disney+ is not available in your country", but I like your reason better. Justification upgraded.
My Facebook feed this morning was filled with friends at home watching Disney+ with their children because of the snow days closing schools across the country. I know scaling a service on Day 1 is difficult but I imagine their load is much higher than expected.
It's a day one launch of a huge product. I'd imagine they chose a Tuesday release so that they could have time to understand their own scaling issues before the weekend, a freak cold front seemed to sabotage that grace period and yet they responded well.
Disclosure, I'm a software engineer. I also own Disney stock. No insider information, just how I'd have planned a huge release like this.
They said on Twitter that launch exceeded their wildest imagination :) I guess this is a good problem to have. Also if you see twitter feed, those issues were fixed pretty quickly so my guess is this was just a unintentional ddos on their servers due to launch. As people dropped off, it released those locks.
Anyone has idea on their tech stack ? Are they using cloud?
On the one hand, of course launch day of a big service is going to have problems; they always do.
On the other hand, Disney owns Hulu. Why is this a launch day of anything other than the cosmetic parts of the frontend and a new empty copy of some databases? What is there to break that's not already well-established?
Managed to download the Apple TV app and watch the first episode of The Mandalorian last night when it released early. Watching that episode was completely smooth at the time. But later while just browsing I found several issues. Some content curation related, like one or two shows only having a single season listed, but multiple seasons' worth of episodes assigned to that single season. Also, the queuing system (adding shows/movies to the watchlist or w/e they call it) didn't seem to work; the check mark showed after selecting it for each item, but nothing would actually come up on the queue page.
Interesting, it worked great for me last night (west coast US) on an Apple TV. The video quality is great (I’m watching on a nice 4K HDR TV) and seems to load impossibly fast when I scrub through a video.
Id love some inside baseball on how the big splashy launch vs engineering realities looked during discussions.
Lots of other new services basically end up being able to “take advantage” of being early market entrances or their own obscurity and then scale with growth.
Remember Disney+ isn't completely new software, Disney acquired MLBtv aka BAMtech to run the site. And their business is live streaming, not "merely" VoD.
BAMtech was spun out of MLB Advanced Media, has been doing streaming since 2002. If you could choose anybody to rely on to launch D+ they’re at the top of the list.
Ya, I don't have too much in terms of insidery baseball. But I did have some colleagues at MLB in nyc. I recall it was pretty much a Java shop. With Akami providing extensive CDN support.
If one is interested in rolling one's own clone of Netflix. there isn't really a tutorial or course to watch to learn how its done. And there very much should be.
The closest you can get is probably Dave Hahn's Day in the Life of a Netflix Engineer series from AWS re:Invent
BAMTech has had high volume days, obviously, but on reflection I couldn't think of any service launch they powered that'd be bigger than this. WWE, HBO relaunch, NHL, MLB -- none seem likely to generate as much demand as this.
Anyone with even a casual understanding of video delivery technology and/or any kind of sketchy, high-level awareness of some of Netflix's largest engineering efforts would've seen this coming. The question is where the engineer's "lolwut" gets transmuted into "Of course Mr. Iger" by that Good Ol' Disney Magic, and why the top executives weren't savvy enough to root that pixie out before it led to public humiliation representing a loss of consumer trust and a serious starting blow to Disney's play to nuke Netflix from orbit, which is probably more important than most people realize, as home ESPN subscriptions represent a huge double-digit percentage of WDC's earnings (which, of course, have been plummeting as more people cut the cord).
Maybe Disney would be better off allowing Netflix to handle all these intricacies and just accepting that they're just going to have to let that $9 per month go to someone else.
Also, launching on a Tuesday is a great way to get people to hammer on the service for a few days before 'seriously' using it for 'movie night' on a Friday or Saturday.
Ja a good rule/tip I learned about scaling: Everyone knows their first bottleneck... be the the db, the search service or the webserver... very few ppl know their SECOND bottleneck. Sometimes the first bottleneck is fixed suddenly(new upgrade, fixed config) but few people knows their second item in the chain that's the bottleneck and get hit by this in production.
They also had glitches before launch day. I've had Disney+ for about a month (nice of them to use Netherland as their try-out region), and one of the first things I tried was chromecast some old Spiderman cartoons (because my youngest son is a fan). Those that had Dutch translations either failed to play, or failed when I tried to cast them. English-only ones worked fine most of the time.
And in general, support for chromecast was very flaky. It usually works the first time, but when you pause or want to play something else, it loses track of what it was casting or that it's even an option at all.
Still, it's to be expected for a new service. I assume they work hard to fix all the bugs. It's nice to have easy access to all Marvel movies and Phineas and Ferb.
Us poor UK based people wouldn't know... it's not launching here until March 2020 (As Sky still have a licence for Disney content until then). Elsewhere I've read that Disney+ has some pretty agressive anti-VPN detection, so you can't bypass the location lock-in either.
As an aside, Disney+'s main draw 'The Mandalorian' is already freely available to download if you know where to look. So, well done Disney, you've totally played into the pirates hands.
Can't help but remember that just a few days ago, when disney PR was ramping up all over social media, the top comment was praising Iger and how great of a CTO he was and what a great tech company Disney was...
I would be surprised if they did. Kubernetes takes a long time to build up internal expertise around, whereas I imagine the mouse can throw money at AWS all day.
I cannot imagine any org being able to pull off such a large scale launch as one single event. Makes me wonder why they didn’t try to phase it by offering “insider” access, trial periods, limited invites, etc. like Gmail did back when it launched.
It's probably because Widevine on Linux doesn't support VMP. But even Amazon Prime Video streams in SD on Linux, better than nothing but still a bad experience for users.
If you don't like DRM, why do you want to buy/rent Disney stuff from the company that invented and bribed Congress to create modern Draconian copyright law?
Yet you seem pretty annoyed by their lack of Linux support...
I don't want to go too far on this because I agree with you on DRM, but "doesn't work on Linux" is a non-issue for most consumer products, for whatever reason.
Sure, you should be annoyed, since it's caused by them using DRM ;) I pointed it out very explicitly in the original comment. I.e. it's not like they are specifically anti-Linux, they are simply DRM obsessed. Which of course doesn't make it any better for Linux users.
I think it's more that they are DRM obsessed and don't give two flying ducks about Linux. If Linux were important, their DRM would work on it. For one I blame them, for the other I don't.
I have to admit I just don't care that much anymore. In the spectrum of things I have the time and energy to really care about, DRM has fallen off the list. I want to watch The Mandalorian, and damn; it was pretty great.
My point is simple, DRM-free services have no issues with video on Linux, because video doesn't really depend on the platform. Video is video everywhere. As long as they aren't using some crazy custom codecs that no one has support for, it will work.
DRM on the other hand is a platform dependent junk. So quite naturally it limits use cases which work with it.
Well, they don't need to care (about supporting DRM), they just need to stop being DRM freaks to begin with and start releasing DRM-free. That's the only real fix :) But of course, it's Disney we are talking about. They never learn.
Well, it doesn't necessarily make sense to be prepared.
You'd basically be preparing for a load spike that you're unlikely to see ever again. It probably makes more sense for most systems to just take the L on day 0 and design for day 1+ instead of designing for day 0 and being overengineered for day 1+.
That’s not the kind of thinking that really works for a brand with such massive consumer trust as Disney. You’re talking about a brand worth $100-200 billion, you don’t just “Take an L.”
That kind of thinking isn’t how top brands are built. Lexus doesn’t lose any customers if the scan button on the LS400 radio is a little fiddly, but that kind of thinking will poison a brand.
