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.
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 owned!
Disney+ operates on top of an expanded MLBAM (BAMTech Media [1]) platform, which has been powering all of ESPNs OTT, Playstatiom Vue, and ran HBO’s OTT offering for a while [2] (Game of Thrones). Disney also opted only to launch in the US, Canada and Netherlands today. So overall, this is still a bit of a botched launch, and the expectation absolutely should have been that they would handle the volume.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAMTech
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/90373706/hbos-tech-is-prepping-a...
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 millions of users (more likely IMO).
They bought BAMTech years ago. The company that built MLB@Bat and saved HBO Go/Now when their in house tech couldn’t cut it.
I don't think it will be anywhere close to that long. Disney already has plenty of experience in streaming video (BAMtech / Hulu).
Video is really hard to get right, a Hollywood-style big bang launch on day 1 is difficult to pull off for any software, let alone video.
I feel for the engineers working there, I wonder what the meetings were like last week, did the engineers know they were not prepared for this?
Anecdotal, but let's be honest:no matter the problems, Disney can hire talent it needs. Question is whether the corporate culture there can not end up being shitty environment for engineers.
I'm not sure some day one capacity issues would justify the enormous expensive of buying NF tbh.
If we're playing this game, Apple should buy Disney. YTD, Apple's market cap has grown by more than the entire market cap of Disney.
Isn't Disney projecting to get like 10-20% of subscribers compared to that of Netflix in five years? Why are people talking like Disney streaming is such a big thing?
I can't think of a launch of this scale that has gone smoothly. Modern console releases, AAA games with online multiplayer, Pokemon Go, healthcare.gov... all cases where organizations literally have billions in cash. It does not matter how much money you have or how great your engineering team is - you can't go scale 0 to 100 on launch day.
Ticket sales platforms for major sports events and concerts don't try to do it - they plan for it by having customers queue.
Did Disney not attempt this?
Well that's the problem isn't it. They chose a scale they couldn't handle ergo, they fucked up.
A more sane approach would be to start by launching in smaller countries and then slowly scale up.
The point of launching on a Tuesday morning was to test out the system with a small audience ahead of Thanksgiving, or even the weekend, when they would properly expect to be slammed. But due to the weather, they're getting slammed by all the people stuck at home with nothing else to do.
Simulating the real world is hard.
Scaling is hard. For everyone. Testing that scaling works is harder.
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 they got their billions after all. And it's not like there is a definitive guide or something that you can follow to build reliable systems without experts.
- App is incredibly slow and takes ages to load. Worst on Kindle Fire and older devices (Netflix/Prime video work fine)
- sometimes a download film will just stop working and crash the device when you try to open it. Only way to fix is to delete the whole app and reinstall. Deleting only the download does not work.
- downloads are huge regardless of device/connection, appears to be no intelligent bandwidth usage.
- logs you out on every single update of the app or operating system (pain on Apple TV where it auto updates every minor version)
- logging back in requires you to go to their website rather than be able to do it on the device.
- never remembers where you are in a film properly
- interface on Apple TV is impossible to use (partly Apple TV controllers fault though)
Yet I still subscribe, because the content itself is great.
It is difficult to built software at scale without having all those users to provide for the load.
They could start with small number of people and get more by invitation. This could have been done before all scaling effort.
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 doubt we'd see a replacement.
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.
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...
But maybe they're looking for access to whatever special SDK the big boys (Netflix, Google) get so they can make their branding folks happy (more consistency with experience on other platforms). I'd imagine developing with that's more involved.
Samsung, some kind of custom Android probably? TV operating systems are a pain in the ass to test, fairly expensive to develop for, and relatively bad at drawing actual usage no matter how widely they're deployed. Might be the delay there. Big enough service needs to pay attention to that junk eventually, but I could see them dropping that for launch.
https://news.samsung.com/us/disney-plus-launches-samsung-sma...
Assuming Disney+ finds its footing, the stage is set for a Hulu/Disney+ duopoly. Comcast and Disney will starve Netflix, Amazon, et al for popular content, while simultaneously bleeding them on exorbitant license fees for the minimal selection they'll be willing to offer.
Instead of switching between Netflix and Amazon Video, most consumers will switch between Hulu for Comcast-owned content (Universal, NBC, others) and Disney+ for Disney-owned content (Disney, ABC, Fox, Pixar, and many more). Netflix subscriptions will lapse accordingly.
Meet the new boss -- same as the old boss. About the only way this is better for the consumer than the old-school cable setup is that municipalities won't be signing exclusive contracts with cable cos barring any competition for decades-long periods of time.
Make the moral choice and pirate their content instead of giving them your money to fund further overreach.
I would happily download a car: zero cost reproduction of useful things makes society as a whole richer. The content industry needs to figure out a new business model to adapt to the information age, and the longer people pay for digital content the more funds these outdated relics will have for legislating a moat around their "property". I'd much prefer a kickstarter or patreon-like model where superfans could fund and watch and participate in development.
I agree with you here but people grew up with Disney. Certain people have an affinity for Disney like I’ve never seen for any other brand.
They will bend over backwards to justify watching it, even if it means making some serious moral compromises.
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.
... if you absolutely must have their crap in the first place.
What is the cheapest hardware that can output arbitrary 1080p video over HDMI at a good frame-rate? Bonus points for having a good chunk of integrated storage and/or bundled with remote control. I bought one of those cheap tiny PCs but the video card wasn't up to the task.
I was going to pirate The Mandalorian because "Sorry, Disney+ is not available in your country", but I like your reason better. Justification upgraded.
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.
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
Maybe Disney would be better off allowing Netflix to handle all these intricacies and just accepting that they're just going to have to let that $9 per month go to someone else.
The service is terrible, often breaks, and has an undocumented but necessary auth code step, with the added gotcha that the ui covers over the code sometimes. The ui is also terrible, who would make it so the next episode of a series doesn't come on by itself? Children are the target audience.
Anyway why wouldn't they either fix up what they've got, or use the lessons so that they don't get a meltdown on the first day?
Also does anyone know whether this was outsourced to say Accenture? It really feels like it.
FWIW, DisneyLife was built by a team smaller than most YC startups. The core technology for DRM/streaming was licensed by another company. When BAM was purchased, the entire product got outsourced. The auth was a central service that we didn't own but were required to use. When I left, we had autoplay of next episodes.
Is there any recent article discussing the tech behind Disney+ specifically?
You'd basically be preparing for a load spike that you're unlikely to see ever again. It probably makes more sense for most systems to just take the L on day 0 and design for day 1+ instead of designing for day 0 and being overengineered for day 1+.
On the other hand, Disney owns Hulu. Why is this a launch day of anything other than the cosmetic parts of the frontend and a new empty copy of some databases? What is there to break that's not already well-established?
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.
But before that, it's great marketing:
Our platform is too popular to handle demand currently, is the message
Anyone has idea on their tech stack ? Are they using cloud?
Seriously tho, I'd imagine this was a heck of a big lift.
And in general, support for chromecast was very flaky. It usually works the first time, but when you pause or want to play something else, it loses track of what it was casting or that it's even an option at all.
Still, it's to be expected for a new service. I assume they work hard to fix all the bugs. It's nice to have easy access to all Marvel movies and Phineas and Ferb.
As an aside, Disney+'s main draw 'The Mandalorian' is already freely available to download if you know where to look. So, well done Disney, you've totally played into the pirates hands.
I am very curious about the future of Netflix as Disney has way more content and deeper pockets.
Disney+ was mostly fine all day for everybody I know. I consider it a successful launch by any measure.
