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Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
51–60 of 376 posts
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#52I 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…
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).
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#53Earlier 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.
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 fel…
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".
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#54I 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.
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 stu…
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
Simulating the real world is hard.
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#55I 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…
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAMTech
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/90373706/hbos-tech-is-prepping-a...
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#56> "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…
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 j…
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.
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 stu…
"well trodden problem" does not make it any easier. Scaling is hard. For everyone. Testing that scaling works is harder.
>"well trodden problem" does not make it any easier.
Yes it does.
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#58I 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.
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.
Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.