211–220 of 376 posts
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…
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.…
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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.
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>"well trodden problem" does not make it any easier. Yes it does.
I have to agree with sterileopinions here. The fact that it's been done multiple times before means you know a lot about how hard it will be, the necessary resources, and can learn from past mistakes. That doesn't make it easy. But it definitely makes it easier. To say otherwise is to argue that experience isn't useful.
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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…
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Have you ever considered writing a blog about your experiences there? What little you did write here in the response about DisneyLife is actually how I think Disney+ is going to turn out (small team, underfunded, demoralized, forced to license 3rd rate tech based on external mandates, etc).
Maybe one day when I can feel more analytical about it. This is a weird day for me, as you can imagine. Also, lots of people I know and like have put a lot of time into Disney+. I don't want to take away from what they're trying to accomplish right now.
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Maybe one day when I can feel more analytical about it. This is a weird day for me, as you can imagine. Also, lots of people I know and like have put a lot of time into Disney+. I don't want to take away from what they're trying to accomplish right now.
I feel ya, Mr. Horn. :-)
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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.
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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.…
Is Disney+ the same tech as DisneyLife? For what it’s worth my daughter loves DisneyLife and I also enjoyed being able to watch the classics so thanks very much for your work.
The DisneyLife browse experience was built on Google Cloud using App Engine in Python.
"Who knew hosting could be so complicated?" - Mickey Mouse