Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 376 posts

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#121

Post by gamblor956 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #119
epaulson wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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+ th…

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.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#122

Post by gamblor956 »

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…

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.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#123

Post by gamblor956 »

ThePadawan wrote: post #83
testplzignore wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#124

Post by WorldMaker »

gamblor956 wrote: post #121
WorldMaker wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+ th…

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.

Here's a source on the FX team working on more Hulu Originals:

https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/fx-hulu-disney-mrs-america...

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.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#125

Post by aidenn0 »

baddox wrote: post #81
bluedevil2k wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I am perfectly happy for other NF subscribers subsidizing the content I watch by them paying more for UHD :)

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#126

Post by bryanlarsen »

baddox wrote: post #116
nickthegreek wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+.

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,…

Netflix's costs are higher for UHD streaming: storage, bandwidth, production, et cetera. What's scummy about it?

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#127

Post by baddox »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #126
baddox wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Netflix's costs are higher for UHD streaming: storage, bandwidth, production, et cetera. What's scummy about it?

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.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#128

Post by dhagz »

nickthegreek wrote: post #112
baddox wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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+.

Disney+ allows streaming to up to four devices simultaneously.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#129

Post by dhagz »

mizzao wrote: post #70
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#130

Post by mantoto »

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…

Why would that be hard? Distributing a limited amount of static content around the world sounds reasonable easy to me.
Post reply on HN