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Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

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Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#21

Post by kareemm »

stefan_ wrote: post #9
thinkingkong wrote: post #5

Id love some inside baseball on how the big splashy launch vs engineering realities looked during discussions. Lots of other new services basically end up being able to “take advantage” of being early market entrances or their own obscurity and then scale with growth. This is a different beast altogether.

Remember Disney+ isn't completely new software, Disney acquired MLBtv aka BAMtech to run the site. And their business is live streaming, not "merely" VoD.

BAMtech was spun out of MLB Advanced Media, has been doing streaming since 2002. If you could choose anybody to rely on to launch D+ they’re at the top of the list.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#22

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

dgritsko wrote: post #7

> "Disney has estimated it will need to attract at least 60 million subscribers, putting it on a par with Netflix, in order for Disney+ to break even." How's that for a barrier to entry? I don't doubt that they will be able to hit it, but it's still a mind-bogglingly high number. I think that's part of why I'd like to see Netflix's continued success - competition is a good thing, and if they were to ever go under I d…

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 recently. Given all of the recognizable brands under the Disney name, maybe people will switch. At a technical level, I question their ability to pull off offering a service as large as Netflix with high availability. Netflix offers very competitive compensation to their engineering talent.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#23

Post by ArtWomb »

stefan_ wrote: post #9
thinkingkong wrote: post #5

Id love some inside baseball on how the big splashy launch vs engineering realities looked during discussions. Lots of other new services basically end up being able to “take advantage” of being early market entrances or their own obscurity and then scale with growth. This is a different beast altogether.

Remember Disney+ isn't completely new software, Disney acquired MLBtv aka BAMtech to run the site. And their business is live streaming, not "merely" VoD.

Ya, I don't have too much in terms of insidery baseball. But I did have some colleagues at MLB in nyc. I recall it was pretty much a Java shop. With Akami providing extensive CDN support.

If one is interested in rolling one's own clone of Netflix. there isn't really a tutorial or course to watch to learn how its done. And there very much should be.

The closest you can get is probably Dave Hahn's Day in the Life of a Netflix Engineer series from AWS re:Invent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_D1G42G0dE

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#25

Post by xenospn »

baddox wrote: post #14

Interesting, it worked great for me last night (west coast US) on an Apple TV. The video quality is great (I’m watching on a nice 4K HDR TV) and seems to load impossibly fast when I scrub through a video.

Maybe you’re the one who broke it by scrubbing too much ;)

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#26

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

futhey wrote: post #12
dgritsko wrote: post #7

> "Disney has estimated it will need to attract at least 60 million subscribers, putting it on a par with Netflix, in order for Disney+ to break even." How's that for a barrier to entry? I don't doubt that they will be able to hit it, but it's still a mind-bogglingly high number. I think that's part of why I'd like to see Netflix's continued success - competition is a good thing, and if they were to ever go under I d…

Likely a calculation of break-even with lost licensing revenue. The Disney+ adventure is a risk because you're foregoing easy licensing money for hard product money, and gambling that it'll be worth it.

I think the traditional media companies will be happy enough if all of the streaming companies fail due to fragmentation and they can ramrod cable back down everyone's throats. Even a streaming failure might be a win for traditional media companies. It might even be the biggest win, honestly. I don't know, but it seems like there was more money in traditional media than in streaming. The brief point in time where everyone was paying for both was probably ideal. But now that a sizable portion of the population have cut out $100+ cable bills (plus cable ads) in favor of 1-3 $10 streaming subscriptions (without ads) makes it seem like traditional media was way more profitable.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#27

Post by berdon »

dgritsko wrote: post #7

> "Disney has estimated it will need to attract at least 60 million subscribers, putting it on a par with Netflix, in order for Disney+ to break even." How's that for a barrier to entry? I don't doubt that they will be able to hit it, but it's still a mind-bogglingly high number. I think that's part of why I'd like to see Netflix's continued success - competition is a good thing, and if they were to ever go under I d…

I wonder how that plays with their canabilizing of Hulu subscribers. Does it count those subscribers in the 60 million?

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#29

Post by cookiecaper »

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 traffic. Netflix has spent the last decade building and tuning a truly world-class content delivery system (big props to all the Netflix HN readers). There's no way Disney would've been able to match that prior to go-live.

The logical conclusion, of course, is that Disney should've just bought Netflix, and it wouldn't be too surprising to see that happen now that their internal attempt has proven that pixie dust doesn't go quite far enough to magically remediate the limitations of physics. Gotta get Netflix-esque content delivery appliances colocated alongside ISP hardware for that type of thing.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#30

Post by hamburglar »

dgritsko wrote: post #7

> "Disney has estimated it will need to attract at least 60 million subscribers, putting it on a par with Netflix, in order for Disney+ to break even." How's that for a barrier to entry? I don't doubt that they will be able to hit it, but it's still a mind-bogglingly high number. I think that's part of why I'd like to see Netflix's continued success - competition is a good thing, and if they were to ever go under I d…

I haven't figured out how they will dig themselves out of the hole of not being ubiquitous like Netflix. I'm a prime candidate for buying their service (small children who are definitely going to be missing some of the Disney content they've previously gotten on Netflix) but as far as I can tell, I have no options to subscribe on my two smart TV devices (Roku and Samsung). I'm sure as heck not buying another device just for them.

I actually went looking for an app on the Samsung app store and found several Disney-branded things that just added to my confusion. One seemed to be streaming TV but 1) it didn't seem to have any recent content, and 2) when I tried it, it wanted me to sign in with my "local TV provider", which just makes me shake my head.

My initial experience as a willing consumer doesn't give me much hope they're gonna pull this off...

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