Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

Post by CountSessine » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 10:45 PM UTC

madrox wrote: post #178

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.…

Post by rosege » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 10:49 PM UTC

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #170

rosege wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Post by mrlala » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 10:50 PM UTC

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.

Post by durden0 » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 10:56 PM UTC

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…

Post by matwood » Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 11:02 PM UTC

papln wrote: post #164

cookiecaper wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+?