Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day • Hacker News Board

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#351

Post by mcv » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:51 AM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #199

empath75 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most kids I know watch YouTube primarily, followed by Netflix. Kids freaking love YouTube.

They do. Kids-wise, we'd be fine without Disney+ and Netflix. My youngest is a big fan of Thomas the Tank Engine, but even on Youtube, he doesn't want to see the actual Thomas shows, but videos of people playing with Thomas toys. No idea why this is such a popular thing, but my oldest watched people play Mario at that age. And now he watches people play Minecraft.

I don't get it. Go play these things yourself, but apparently kids love to watch others play, and there's tons and tons of that on Youtube.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#352

Post by lotsofpulp » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 10:31 AM UTC

cududa wrote: post #313

lotsofpulp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are clearly engaging in user hostile behavior hoping that the number of users who cancel due to being inconvenienced is less than the number who are retained/gained by being fooled into thinking there is more than there is.

I mean I think it’s more over engineering idiocy. I was staying with my cousin for a week and Was amazed at the content Netflix recommends/ surfaces him versus me. So much cool stuff that he had, versus the relative genre stuff I get in my own account

Originally, on AppleTV, when I opened the app, the first thing I’d click would let me resume watching what I was watching previously. Then, one day, it changed so they I had to scroll up or down to find the row of “continue watching”, and it wasn’t even one row up or down, I had to make an effort to look for it.

I would assume this was due them wanting me to see what else they had, or maybe feel like having to scroll would make it seem like they had a lot. Or maybe it was incompetence. Either way, I saw no reason for them to inconvenience me, so I canceled Netflix.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#353

Post by Mindwipe » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 12:31 PM UTC

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…

The actual streaming delivery seemed to go okay yesterday, they have enough CDN peering. It was the authentication services that had issues. Those are fairly common day one problems for lots of online services that are fixable.

I'm not sure some day one capacity issues would justify the enormous expensive of buying NF tbh.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#354

Post by Mindwipe » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 12:36 PM UTC

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.

Well, it's not "easy", at Netflix scale. Lots of Netflix traffic is done via local caching servers at ISPs as CDN delivery isn't reliable enough. Minimising playback latency is really, really hard and NF do very well here. Robust geofiltering in those scenarios is hard if you're trying to check the video essence and not just the license.

Having said that, there are a lot of reasonably mature solutions in the market to address many of these points, and it doesn't appear that was the issue yesterday.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#355

Post by Mindwipe » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 12:37 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #81

bluedevil2k wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying Netflix? I think Netflix is going to start a steady decline as the content owners continually pull their stuff from Netflix for their own streaming services. The Netflix original stuff, let's be honest, is hit or miss, with most of the movies being a hard miss.

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 have much of a problem with Netflix content, but it's the price that just doesn't make sense.

Netflix's biggest problem is that they've spent a decade educating customers to expect their service at below cost with an unrealistically low price point funded by debt.

They need to hope the sentiment above isn't too common.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#356

Post by Mindwipe » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 12:41 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #127

bryanlarsen wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix's costs are higher for UHD streaming: storage, bandwidth, production, et cetera. What's scummy about it?

In my view, the "native" format that they produced the content in is the format they should be delivering by default (if supported by the viewer's setup). Of course I recognize that people will disagree, after all, UHD Blu-rays also generally cost more than 1080p Blu-rays. But of course, UHD Blu-rays aren't backwards compatible with standard Blu-ray equipment, so it doesn't feel like an artificial limitation simply f…

> This also seems to be a no-brainer for Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and Disney+, which (as far as I can tell) don't have any concept of charging based on video/audio quality.

Almost every other video service globally does, and of those you mentioned Prime's pricing is mostly based on shipping, Apple TV+ at this point is effectively a PR campaign and not a proper service, and Disney+ is running at a massive loss leader to build share.

Netflix isn't charging a sustainable amount of money as it is. You should probably think of it less as charging more for UHD as offering a crazy discount for lower content quality.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#357

Post by Mindwipe » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 12:59 PM UTC

jamil7 wrote: post #339

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.

Not surprising at all, what is surprising to me is that companies still insist on doing the "Big Reveal" style launches. Why not open it up gradually in phases via a beta program or something?

It's hard in this case when the release schedule is so heavily based around expiring licensing agreements for content elsewhere tbf.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#358

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

jamesjyu wrote: post #276

user5994461 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The olympics and world cups do that every year just fine.

But their usage pattern and infra can build on past experience, whereas D+ has none of that. Black swans galore.

Their past experience of running Hulu and ESPN?

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#359

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

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.

FWIW, my sister's kids (3 and 2) aren't the least bit interested in Disney.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#360

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

proverbialbunny wrote: post #245

cwkoss wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential, but does anyone know of good hardware to function as a standalone HDMI output video server? I've been wanting to play with making a 'plug and play' box that I could give to kids/grandparents in my life who don't have the technical skills to pirate for themselves, preloaded with content I think is good and they'd enjoy. What is the cheapest hardware that can output arbitrary 1080p video over HDMI at a good…

Arguably, buying a smart tv is the cheapest way to go. There is the Pi 4, which once all the parts and shipping are put together about $80. Though, eh.. imho it's better if you get one of the Intel Nucs. They can be had for around $200 and are quite good.

Indeed. Smart TV and a load of movies on a USB HDD. Works for my elderly in-laws.