do they use kubernetes?
Bamtech is heavily based on ECS and other AWS services.
Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
31–40 of 376 posts
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#32> "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 d…
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 rece…
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.
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#33How can you be unprepared for the load? They would have and should have expected and tested for the load on launch day.
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+.
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#34On 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?
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#35Id 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. This is a different beast altogether.
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.
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 eve…
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.
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#37And of course, they are so obsessed with DRM, that it doesn't work on Linux. What else to expect from Disney.
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#38> "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 d…
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 rece…
This is a good video on the technical advantages at Netflix, just from the way their platform is built [1].
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#39How can you be unprepared for the load? They would have and should have expected and tested for the load on launch day.
Probably compounded by the fact that a bunch of schools closed in the midwest and northeast because of the snow.
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#40I 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 traffi…
>I'd expect them to have continuous issues for the first 3-6 months
I don't think it will be anywhere close to that long. Disney already has plenty of experience in streaming video (BAMtech / Hulu).