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Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

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Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#101

Post by zzzcpan »

riazrizvi wrote: post #42
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.

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…

> 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.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#102

Post by williamjackson »

shantly wrote: post #56
hamburglar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consistenc…

Disney+ is on Roku, they just didn't make the channel available before today.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#103

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

hamburglar wrote: post #30
dgritsko wrote: post #7

> "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…

Is your Samsung old? You should have the app. I know that when I turned on my LG TV this morning it notified me there was a Disney+ app available.

https://news.samsung.com/us/disney-plus-launches-samsung-sma...

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#104

Post by perfect_wave »

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 assume the parent was talking about buying Netflix for the technology and not for the content.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#105

Post by matt-attack »

zzzcpan wrote: post #101
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…

> 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 th…

Wasn’t this the whole point of buying BAMTech though? So they would have the technical leadership?

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#106

Post by riffraff »

selebrazin wrote: post #98
sassifrass wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Can…

A small correction: Disney+ launched in the Netherlands in September 2019 [1] which was treated as a public test. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/12/20862167/free-disney-plus...

Wow, then today does sound like a botched launch.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#107

Post by zzzcpan »

cookiecaper wrote: post #29
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.

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…

> which may be Netflix's only prayer

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?

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#108

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

dwoozle wrote: post #69
hombre_fatal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

Why not? How many customers do you think Disney lost for its morning disruptions? I'd guess basically zero.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#109

Post by awill »

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…

That's actually the hard part. Video streaming is easy, and done with CDNs.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#110

Post by riazrizvi »

SigmundA wrote: post #54
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…

No plan survives contact with the enemy. Simulating the real world is hard.

'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'.
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