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

171–180 of 376 posts

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#171

Post by papln »

shmerl wrote: post #148
EpicEng wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it dumb though? Why should they care about Linux users? Really, how does it make sense for them to spend time on it?

It sure is, because it will be broken and pirated either way. So what did they achieve? They simply lost paying customers, nothing more. It totally makes no sense to spend any time and resources on DRM. Instead, they should start offering video DRM-free for sale, not just for rent. The reasons they are pushing this junk are political. As was well explained here: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_dr…

If you don't like DRM, why do you want to buy/rent Disney stuff from the company that invented and bribed Congress to create modern Draconian copyright law?

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#172

Post by Slartie »

awill wrote: post #109
geerlingguy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, handing over giant checks to Akamai is easy, but it becomes a lot harder if you do the CDN part yourself. Like all the really big streaming video providers do, because otherwise they wouldn't be competitive at scale.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#173

Post by bduerst »

jonwachob91 wrote: post #147
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 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…

Disney is a content conglomerate, not a technology company. It shouldn't be surprising that each individual company silos their technology functions:

https://storage.googleapis.com/titlemax-media/1c8ace8f-every...

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#174

Post by zamalek »

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 also strongly doubt you can simply bootstrap a Netflix caliber development team, no matter how much you spend. I have no doubt that the people who came up with Disney+ had no concept of this.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#175

Post by triceratops »

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,…

They're offering better quality for a higher price. I don't understand why that's "scummy". It's the most honest way to price something.

You could just watch it in regular quality - it's not that bad. Either you feel UHD is worth the extra $3/month (honestly a pittance compared to the price of a UHD TV) or you do not.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#176

Post by baddox »

Softcadbury wrote: post #154
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).

I don't understand how people can criticize the price of Netflix. Remember, just 10 years ago, the price of a single DVD ?

Yes, of course it’s all relative, but that cuts both ways, because we also have other streaming plans to compare prices with.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#177

Post by davedx »

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...

Yep we've been watching it in the Netherlands for the last couple of weeks. Been working pretty well to be honest...

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#178

Post by madrox »

lordnacho wrote: post #168

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…

Hello! Former engineering director for DisneyLife here. Most of the team wasn't allowed to move to Disney+ and have since moved on. The DisneyLife journey would make a great book, but doesn't really fit into a HN comment.

FWIW, DisneyLife was built by a team smaller than most YC startups. The core technology for DRM/streaming was licensed by another company. When BAM was purchased, the entire product got outsourced. The auth was a central service that we didn't own but were required to use. When I left, we had autoplay of next episodes.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#179

Post by echelon »

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?

You don't need to pay a Netflix salary to build streaming video. I predict Netflix salaries will begin to erode over time.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#180

Post by lmilcin »

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.

This could have been avoided if the service was introduced slowly. Big launch days planned months in advance don't really play well with software development reality.

It is difficult to built software at scale without having all those users to provide for the load.

They could start with small number of people and get more by invitation. This could have been done before all scaling effort.

Post reply on HN