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Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

bbc.com

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Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#311

Post by shmerl »

EpicEng wrote: post #309
shmerl wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is simple, DRM-free services have no issues with video on Linux, because video doesn't really depend on the platform. Video is video everywhere. As long as they aren't using some crazy custom codecs that no one has support for, it will work. DRM on the other hand is a platform dependent junk. So quite naturally it limits use cases which work with it.

That is not in any way untrue... but I understand why they don't care :)

Well, they don't need to care (about supporting DRM), they just need to stop being DRM freaks to begin with and start releasing DRM-free. That's the only real fix :) But of course, it's Disney we are talking about. They never learn.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#312

Post by dehrmann »

cwkoss wrote: post #227

Disney is responsible for vast lobbying efforts to criminalize access to culture around intellectual property. Make the moral choice and pirate their content instead of giving them your money to fund further overreach.

I'm fine with the effort they go to to defend Mickey Mouse. Other than Steamboat Willie (which I haven't actually seen) and Fantasia, I can't name any other appearances of his, but he's still Kardashian-famous. This is only because Disney built him up as a brand and continues investing in him, and he's synonymous with Disney. Outside of fair use and parody, Disney has earned the right to use that IP as they please.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#313

Post by cududa »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #48
fluidcruft wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what is it with Netflix and making it impossible to find something to watch anymore? It's like you open it up and not only do all the lists change and it's not easy to find things, but they also run around changing the cover images of the series you've been watching so you don't even recognize it at first and you're hunting around to find it again.

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

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#314

Post by pfooti »

scarface74 wrote: post #285
pfooti wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, the same happens for me - i have a relatively recent vizio tv, and the hulu app is terrible - video skips and freezes or the whole app crashes. I've taken to just using my mediapc to run hulu in a chrome tab instead. Both devices are hooked to the same ethernet hub, and other things like prime video and netflix run just fine on the vizio.

It’s the TV. The built in apps on all smart TVs are subpar.

Keep in mind that the Netflix and Amazon prime apps on the TV work fine. Even the Plex app works well. Just the Hulu app that stinks. I don't disagree that it's likely a tough platform to develop for (and having a htpc is super useful still) but it's really just the Hulu app that is unusable.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#315

Post by myrandomcomment »

jonwachob91 wrote: post #147
cookiecaper wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So I do not believe that ESPN or Hulu have the scale numbers of Netflix. Also in the case of ESPN when they do a live stream at scale the method used is much different setup then video on demand. For example, in a live stream because everyone is watching the same thing you can use multicast replication to your edge pop which dramatically lowers BW and overhead. It would be great if it worked to the end user but ISPs are not setup to handle it.

Just checked the numbers: Netflix ~700M, Hulu ~28M, ESPN depending on the source ~6M.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#317

Post by jhall1468 »

jorblumesea wrote: post #305
MentallyRetired wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP on the thread and actually I'm a former disney dev for disneyworld.com. It's a sweat shop. They had me working 100 hours a week the first 4 months I was there. They would order me food so I wouldnt have to leave my desk. Many times I slept under it. Then I had 6 months of pretty normal hours working on maintenance, then I went back on another project and they had me working 60 - 80 hours (with some 40 and some 100…

> Great resume builder Compared to any big 4 or FAANG though? You can work at MS and pull 40 hour weeks or AMZN/FB with 60. Pays better, looks better.

You can easily work 40 at tons of Amazon teams. AWS and parts of retail have the "crack the whip" culture, but it's not as bad as people think it is.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#318

Post by takeda »

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

Do you know whose account is older, yours or your friend's? I'm wondering if their algorithm thinks it knows you well and thinks you won't like these shows and maybe your friend's account is newer so it tries to experiment more?

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#319

Post by takeda »

tedsanders wrote: post #269
8ytecoder wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know when product managers are going to realize that one size doesn't fit all. Different people use Netflix differently and usually even the same people use it differently at different times. There should be an option to switch between these modes. Netflix, for example, could easily have multiple modes. A discover based on my past preferences/popularity mode and a categorical listing mode. The problem is them…

They do have these modes, though, right? The home page is for discovery based on your past preferences/popularity. And there are TV and movie pages in which you can display shows by genre or even A-Z. Disclosure: I work at Netflix and would like to make it better for everyone who uses it.

I think you guys need to make it a bit more obvious that other options are available besides the home view.

Re: Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

#320

Post by myrandomcomment »

matt-attack wrote: post #105
zzzcpan wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t understand how a company with billions of dollars in resources can fail to solve such a well trodden problem. Billions of dollars don't give you good technical management and people with expertise to build such things. They only give an organization where there is no pressure to be good at anything and, you know, actually compete, there is only pressure to make sure they don't have to compete, that's how th…

Wasn’t this the whole point of buying BAMTech though? So they would have the technical leadership?

Issue is that BAMTech has not had to deal with this scale. Everything breaks at scale. That being said, the issues with the signup and login and servicing webpages are an understood problem at scale, so I do not give them a pass for those failures. On the stream side, Netflix wrote the book on it. There is a great deal of published work by Netflix team on this, down to kernel level coding and tweaking to get 100Gbs out of a single FreeBSD server.

I know if I had to build this I would throw money at the issue by making an outrageous offer to someone that has built this before (from maybe Netflix?) to come and do it for me.

As an aside I have worked on a project like this before on the networking side for the Olympics around 8 years ago. Heck, back in the .bomb I worked at a startup national ISP were doing QoS for video delivery was part of what we were doing. Never worked quite right.

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