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

321–330 of 376 posts

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#321

Post by cookiecaper »

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+?

Disney was (and presumably still is) collecting tens of dollars per month for every cable subscription that has access to ESPN (the number I remember reading was something like $23 but that may be incorrect). Since ESPN is included in most cable subscriptions, virtually every cable subscription cancelled is an immediate revenue loss for TWDC.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#322

Post by takeda »

papln wrote: post #166
briffle wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having your show streamed on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney+ and others at the same time would make you more money than having it streamed only on your single service.

They are all playing to kill Netflix and other competition so they can establish monopoly like they had on cable.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#323

Post by odkamkfn »

scrumbledober wrote: post #202
dhagz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are some things that should remain in the Disney vault...

Song of the South is a pretty good movie, and people should stop lying about it.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#324

Post by dannytatom »

arkades wrote: post #247
edoceo wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the moral choice be to just not watch? Isn't piracy stealing? Morally: don't buy it, don't steal it and also don't view it. Reward other content providers and reduce the relevance of Disney.

That’s if you believe that Disney properly owns the material it has claimed. If you believe that the default ownership rights to culture already belong to everyone, pirating isn’t theft, it’s a refusal to be deprived of a natural right. Whether Disney makes crap or not is irrelevant.

why would you believe that, though? why do you have an innate right to someone else's work?

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#325

Post by quacker »

cwkoss wrote: post #292
quacker wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you name single great work of art created by Disney that isn't mostly derivative? Reflect on why you can't: they are monetizers of existing culture, not creators of originality. You sort of have a point, since this is Disney we're considering, but this is a slippery slope. Most _everything_ is derivative work. Should I pirate all commercial software that's powered by open source software? Should I never pay for…

You should pirate content that you want to consume without supporting the creators. If Disney only made derivative movies and didn't lobby to to make IP laws more strict and punitive, I would not think it was immoral to give them your money. Consumers should consider paying for IP an investment in the creator's future work. If a creator made something you enjoy, fill their pockets so they can make another great thing…

> You should pirate content that you want to consume without supporting the creators.

I wonder how it is to feel so entitled that you see nothing wrong with this - to think that you deserve that content and that all the cast and crew deserve nothing in return.

> the decline of film as art we've seen in the past ~3 decades.

You must also have a very narrow definition of art to believe this.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#326

Post by takeda »

wolco wrote: post #272
cwkoss wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Culture is public. By arguing that it should be privately owned, you are effectively saying that poor people shouldn't be allowed to participate. Disney's business model has been destroying the potential of thousands of great artists who failed to reach cultural relevancy because their parents were barely making ends meet and couldn't afford to buy in, and the cultural language is now locked behind a gate with a toll…

Any personal photos you and your family take are part of culture. Should they be public or do you get to decide? Much of culture is private. Poor people not participating in Disney content doesn't take into account the content on public tv or libruaries that will loan dvds either. The price of a month of Disney+ will make things cheaper as well.

That's not how it works, copyright doesn't protect privacy, those are two separate things.

Disney is a company that took folk stories that lived in public domain, packaged it and released as their own. That's ok, the works were public domain anyway.

The problem is that after that, they continue to lobby in a way that no future works will ever enter public domain.

Our constitution says that copyright needs to expire, there is a loophole though, because it doesn't say when it should expire, so every time Mickey Mouse copyright is about to expire they lobby the congress to extend it further.

The copyright originally lasted 10 years, now it's 120 years after author's death.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#327

Post by cookiecaper »

wolco wrote: post #258
dewey wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Disney has a huge back catalog that they can use in the coming years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault ) would be one reason for that (and a lot of nostalgia).

With 10% of netflix customers volume but how many will drop netflix of that number for disney? Disney will do fine so will netflix. Plenty of room for both.

Disney has [more] skin in the game now and will always give their own service highly preferential treatment. This isn't just about Mickey Mouse -- Disney owns many other major content producers. Personally, I've been hearing people complain about Disney-owned content disappearing from Netflix for more than a year already.

I'm sure they'll continue to license something to third-party streaming platforms, but they'll do their darnedest to make sure that if consumers are only going to choose one streaming service, it'll be one they control and operate.

It's nothing against Netflix itself -- they're one of the tech companies I admire the most. But they're stuck depending on relatively-short-term license agreements to offer most of the content that people are willing to pay for.

Whether or not the consumer is willing to pay for multiple streaming services, the media companies are going to be much less willing to make the content available outside of their own little streamer. This means rough seas ahead for Netflix.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#328

Post by legohead »

phd514 wrote: post #62
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…

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.

> I got the impression they expected you to be willing to work for less because you were working on something related to MLB.

this is how Blizzard pays as well. their engineering compensation is just sad. but hey, it's Blizzard!

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#329

Post by codycraven »

mucle6 wrote: post #184
jboggan wrote: post #28

My Facebook feed this morning was filled with friends at home watching Disney+ with their children because of the snow days closing schools across the country. I know scaling a service on Day 1 is difficult but I imagine their load is much higher than expected.

If a snow day is enough to overload their servers, I don't think they would stand a chance on the weekends.

It's a day one launch of a huge product. I'd imagine they chose a Tuesday release so that they could have time to understand their own scaling issues before the weekend, a freak cold front seemed to sabotage that grace period and yet they responded well.

Disclosure, I'm a software engineer. I also own Disney stock. No insider information, just how I'd have planned a huge release like this.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#330

Post by ragebol »

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.

I've been using Disney+ since they pre-launced in the Netherlands for the last ca. 2 months IIRC, without any issue what so ever. But then again: NL is a small country.
Post reply on HN