181–190 of 324 posts
It would be equally futile to say "Betsy's Diner may serve coffee, but it isn't a cafe; it's mainly just a sandwich and pastry shop." Or, "Fritz's Foods may sell a few items in bulk, but it isn't a grocer; they mainly sell individually-packaged items."
> The tech has to be good - but, it’s still all about the TV. If Netflix was only showing reruns of Frasier and Ally McBeal no-one would have signed up I think this is always a bit of a silly argument. If Netflix was showing everything, but the tech was terrible, no one would've signed up. You need both.
I'd disagree considering there's more than a few streaming platforms with sub-par tech. Hulu is quite buggy, as is HBO Max. Criterion Channel is literally just Vimeo and didn't even have working closed captioning until recently.
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> serving several thousand VODs and that problem is solved You're kidding right? You think this problem is solved? Try using HBO. A tech company is any company that understands it can leverage technology effectively to run a more efficient organization. They treat tech as the way to solve problems rather than throwing people at the problem.
Could you clarify? I subscribe to HBO Max and it works fine.
First came HBO Go. This was the online streaming for those with HBO as part of a standard cable package. Apparently it was built on a .Net stack and had huge problems.
HBO Now is the service created for standalone sales of streaming. Apparently it had a completely different tech stack because of issues with HBO Go. Apparently it came from the same people who did the streaming services for MLB (Major League Baseball)> In my experience it was very good.
HBO Max is the expanded and updated content ecosystem that came with the merger. I don't know what the tech stack here is. I suspect it's just incremental changes to HBO Now but that's just a guess.
Perhaps the commenter was referring to HBO Go's problems as evidence that serving VODs isn't "solved". To clarify, I mean "solved for Netflix".
Here's the framework I use: "tech companies" are those where tech still plays a significant factor in the growth of the company such that it's important to an executive level. Example: Google is still a tech company. As much as some might view search as "solved" (just like it was when Google was founded I might add), search continues to get better. Tech still plays a significant role in the actual core business (ie a…
Google is a tech company because both the search and the ads networks are hard at the planet scale; we can see how hard it is to compete.
Same applies to e.g. Twitter or Uber. It applies much less to, say, Reddit, or eBay, or Craiglist; their tech is secondary to their existing network effects.
A company like GrubHub definitely has a strong tech branch, but the tech is secondary to its delivery network and restaurant contracts.
A company like CNN, equally, must have a strong engineering / IT branch, but it's so secondary it feels totally invisible, and everyone sees them as a "media company", not a "tech company".
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Eh, as a user Netflix original content is a large part of why I still have a subscription. I used Netflix back when it was mailing me DVDs, and loved the online streaming back in the halcyon days when it seemed like they had everything . Then came the dark days when content owners began pulling their IP from Netflix and scattering it all over the internet behind a dozen different options that offered them more money…
> It didn't matter what their UX or uptime was or how smooth their video codecs, they didn't have enough content I wanted to watch. Netflix has developed a novel data system (as evidenced by papermill) that is likely responsible for countless decisions that manifested the content which brought you back. I don't know first hand but I suspect data is integrated into their everyday processes in ways most companies can't…
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I think it is pretty easy to define tech company. Is the IT/Software Dev a profit center or a cost center, easy as that.
What about companies that aren’t remotely profitable at all? Isn’t that a huge portion of notable tech companies?
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If it's solved, why is the UI for any other content streamer as seamless on my roku as the Netflix one. All the others, I might as well be using a 13 channel rotary dial still. Even Prime sucks, just try rewinding or fast forwarding a minute and see how frustrating that is.
The problem is, for consumers, these minor technical issues don't matter as much as the content on the platforms. Yes, Netflix works much more smoothly than HBO, but we don't choose Netflix over HBO because of the quality of the video streaming app, but for the shows we actually want to watch.
> The tech has to be good - but, it’s still all about the TV. If Netflix was only showing reruns of Frasier and Ally McBeal no-one would have signed up I think this is always a bit of a silly argument. If Netflix was showing everything, but the tech was terrible, no one would've signed up. You need both.
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Most people wouldn't consider car companies tech companies, but they definitely do R&D and directly sell the technology that results from that inside their cars. Probably because people don't even have a good definition of "tech". Everything we use is tech. Even books. Some of it is old, some of it is new. But people's definition of tech mostly centers around when they were born. As a software developer, I mostly car…
Everybody I know considers a car company a tech company. I think there exists a strange Silicon Valley definition of tech out there. But maybe my German bias shows. I mean, most of the stuff in SV barely qualifies as tech.
I have never heard that. Car companies are mostly manufacturing, that is the major part of their organizations and what drives their decisions. They have big engineering teams, but they have way bigger teams working at factories. If you had a company just creating car designs and selling those to manufacturing companies it would be a tech company, but the current ones aren't.
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Could you clarify? I subscribe to HBO Max and it works fine.
I wonder if that commenter meant HBO Go? HBO tech has had an interesting history. First came HBO Go. This was the online streaming for those with HBO as part of a standard cable package. Apparently it was built on a .Net stack and had huge problems. HBO Now is the service created for standalone sales of streaming. Apparently it had a completely different tech stack because of issues with HBO Go. Apparently it came fr…