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Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

bbc.com

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Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#81

Post by baddox »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #61
cookiecaper wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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).

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#82

Post by cookiecaper »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #61
cookiecaper wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#83

Post by ThePadawan »

testplzignore wrote: post #78
MentallyRetired wrote: post #3

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.

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…

OK - so if it is so obvious that you can't scale from 0 to 100 on launch day, why not anticipate that?

Ticket sales platforms for major sports events and concerts don't try to do it - they plan for it by having customers queue.

Did Disney not attempt this?

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#84

Post by epaulson »

cookiecaper wrote: post #68
berdon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how that plays with their canabilizing of Hulu subscribers. Does it count those subscribers in the 60 million?

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…

Disney owns most of Hulu and has control. Comcast has agreed to eventually sell its remaining stake back to Disney.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#85

Post by buckminster »

geerlingguy wrote: post #52
cookiecaper wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 million…

It makes some sense if it's the user onboarding that's failing. That's the one part that should see much less traffic in normal operation.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#86

Post by riazrizvi »

berdon wrote: post #45
riazrizvi wrote: post #42

Earlier 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.

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.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#88

Post by tootie »

MentallyRetired wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#89

Post by milesokeefe »

dwoozle wrote: post #63
Hamuko wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure it's not built on top of Hulu. They bought a majority in BAMTech way before getting Hulu.

Hulu is dogshit technically, I would hope that Disney+ doesn’t hit a line of Hulu code.

What technical issues/deficiencies have you seen with Hulu?

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#90

Post by crooked-v »

logfromblammo wrote: post #50
fluidcruft wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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".

Note that Disney+ does this as well by default, though there's a setting to turn it off.
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