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> Not only can they predict it, but I imagine to a large extent they control what people watch. This is similar to what happened with Google Play Music. They u
by dlandis 10y ago
> Not only can they predict it, but I imagine to a large extent they control what people watch.
This is similar to what happened with Google Play Music. They used to have a really nice feature that enabled you to browse through all genres and continue to drill down several levels into very specific sub genres. It was a great way to discover new music.
The problem was people were streaming way too much music that was not optimally cached and it was causing scalability issues for them. The solution? Remove the subgenre browse feature and transition to a radio station-based approach. You now have the choice of a limited set of predefined radio stations, each with a limited number of tracks, which I assume are all cached in an optimized way, but you cannot drill down nearly as far into the sub genres.
If you browse the google forums there have been thousands of comments about the reduced functionality over the past year or so.
- Pxtl 10y agoTo be fair, they paid good money for Songza's radio stations system. But yes, the browsability is awful. I don't mind the radio stations approach, but I can't even find good listings of what radio stations they provide... and when I do find a radio station I like, I find it has a rotation of like 12 songs.
- Something1234 10y agoThis seems to be true of like at least 90% of music streaming services, just with varying numbers of songs per station. Like with slacker it was 50 songs, and then a small number of extras put in. Or amazon music playing the same song 2 or 3 times during the same listening session.
- mattmanser 10y agoJust to echo Pxtl, but much more explicitly, I don't think this had anything to do with caches or scalability, it was because they bought Songza. If you've any evidence, please do share and I'm happy to put my hands up and admit I'm wrong, but the announcement was that the change was supposed to be because they now had these amazing hand curated playlists.
- gohrt 10y agoWhy not both? Maybe Sognza's playlists were a caching solution.
- mattmanser 10y agoOccam's razor. dlandis is suggesting a pretty over-complicated, anti-consumer reason as to why google started pushing curated lists. Or you can buy into the incredibly simple "because google bought Sognza to compete with spotify's curated lists".
- dlandis 10y ago> Google looks forward to bringing back those genres/subgenres, and even microgenres, once they've had a chance to improve them and make them more scalable around the world. That is a comment from a top contributor in the product forum. Thread is here https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/play/i9meVyGV2so https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/play/i9meVy...
- CamperBob2 10y agoWow, that thread is angrier than the Maps forum. Pretty impressive achievement on Google's part.
- chipperyman573 10y agoWhat's so bad about the maps forum?