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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

#161

Post by duahncjak »

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,…

It’s common practice for the online video rentals (many different providers including Google and Amazon) to charge more for HD. In reality the marginal cost of providing digital content is almost zero, so there is never going to be “cost-plus” pricing. They are always going to charge whatever the market will bear. Price discrimination allows more value-conscious customers to get content at a lower price than they would otherwise.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#162

Post by jonwachob91 »

a-wu wrote: post #151
jonwachob91 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> The logical conclusion, of course, is that Disney should've just bought Netflix Why buy Netflix when you could get a similarly qualified team and infrastructure by buying Hulu? Oh wait... Disney already owns Hulu... Whoops. What about ESPN. ESPN has a really good streaming product. Oh wait... Disney already owns that one too... Disney didn't need to buy Netflix, they just needed to use the resources they already…

ESPN's streaming is one of the worst ones I've ever used. It is constantly buffering on my 275 Mbps downlink and every other time it has issues with authenticating to my provider.

Wow. That is interesting. I haven't used ESPN's streaming platform in about a year (since they did that switch and stopped including streaming in cable packages). But I used to stream European Soccer games on my second monitor at work virtually every day. My work internet was maybe 75 mbps and it worked fine.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#163

Post by papln »

empath75 wrote: post #114
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…

people who have kids are going to get disney, no matter what.

This is a myth that needs to die, for the sake of frugality and for the sake of open culture that Disney is trying to hostile takeover via copyright abuse.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#164

Post by papln »

cookiecaper wrote: post #44
futhey wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

If ESPN is what people want to pay for, why can't they just jack up the price of ESPN instead of making Disney+?

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#165

Post by btables »

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…

Disney bought one of the most successful video streaming companies in the world to drive Disney+ called Bamtech, they didn't start from scratch at all - https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2017/08/08/disney-ac...

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#166

Post by papln »

briffle wrote: post #36
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

That may be because it's far more expensive to make one consumer-hour of TV/movie content than 1 consumer-hour of music content.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#167

Post by user5994461 »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #80
phd514 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the engineering compensation factor, I interviewed with BAMTech (the successor to MLB [Major League Baseball] Advanced Media and the underlying video streaming platform for Disney) a few years ago. Their comp was considerably lower than Netflix. I got the impression they expected you to be willing to work for less because you were working on something related to MLB.

> willing to work for less because you were working on something related to MLB This part I don't get. The intersection of people who love MLB but are the best talent you're looking for, may not be aligned. If you want great engineers, you shouldn't care whether or not they particularly like MLB. It's a weird hiring funnel. Not all projects demand the best talent, but if Disney Plus wants 60 million subscribers, they…

There's plenty of engineers available, especially outside of the valley where there aren't a thousand companies competing for the same pool of people.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#168

Post by lordnacho »

One thing I haven't heard is how DisneyLife fits into this. I use it at the moment for my kids and it has all the stuff you expect from Disney, basically the animated movies like a Frozen and Moana.

The service is terrible, often breaks, and has an undocumented but necessary auth code step, with the added gotcha that the ui covers over the code sometimes. The ui is also terrible, who would make it so the next episode of a series doesn't come on by itself? Children are the target audience.

Anyway why wouldn't they either fix up what they've got, or use the lessons so that they don't get a meltdown on the first day?

Also does anyone know whether this was outsourced to say Accenture? It really feels like it.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#169

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

newfangle wrote: post #155
jonwachob91 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> The logical conclusion, of course, is that Disney should've just bought Netflix Why buy Netflix when you could get a similarly qualified team and infrastructure by buying Hulu? Oh wait... Disney already owns Hulu... Whoops. What about ESPN. ESPN has a really good streaming product. Oh wait... Disney already owns that one too... Disney didn't need to buy Netflix, they just needed to use the resources they already…

I believe disney has every advantage in the streaming wars so i decided to see if they have any open dev positions and i also decided to check what reviews of working there were like. Seems like Disney does not have an engineering culture and software engineers are at the bottom of the totem pole.

This kind of makes sense. It isn't their competency. I think it's general advice to never work in a role at a company where that's not their core competency. E.g., engineers are praised at places like Google, etc. Engineers working in entertainment (e.g, Disney) or health care (e.g, Epic Systems) are not as well treated.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#170

Post by ProfessorLayton »

rosege wrote: post #137
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…

Netflix is renown for paying their engineers very well. I would be interested to know if Disney+ also pay such high salaries to attract the best?

I interviewed with them and no, they do not pay all that well, and their recruiter was pretty upfront about disclosing that early in the process.

Additionally, I've hired a candidate that had an offer in hand from Disney+ and we were easily able to outbid them, (I was at a non-FAANG company at the time)

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