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Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day

232 points by zafar1 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
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MentallyRetired 7y ago
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.
- deleted 7y ago
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- cookiecaper 7y ago
  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.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    >I'd expect them to have continuous issues for the first 3-6 months I don't think it will be anywhere close to that long. Disney already has plenty of experience in streaming video (BAMtech / Hulu).
  - geerlingguy 7y ago
    The sad thing is they're having issues with loading login pages, authenticating via API, app API backend routes... pretty much every layer of their app stack and that's _before_ any video can be streamed to end users. 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).
    - buckminster 7y ago
      It makes some sense if it's the user onboarding that's failing. That's the one part that should see much less traffic in normal operation.
    - awill 7y ago
      That's actually the hard part. Video streaming is easy, and done with CDNs.
      - Slartie 7y ago
        Sure, handing over giant checks to Akamai is easy, but it becomes a lot harder if you do the CDN part yourself. Like all the really big streaming video providers do, because otherwise they wouldn't be competitive at scale.
      - Mindwipe 7y ago
        Well, it's not "easy", at Netflix scale. Lots of Netflix traffic is done via local caching servers at ISPs as CDN delivery isn't reliable enough. Minimising playback latency is really, really hard and NF do very well here. Robust geofiltering in those scenarios is hard if you're trying to check the video essence and not just the license. Having said that, there are a lot of reasonably mature solutions in the market to address many of these points, and it doesn't appear that was the issue yesterday.
    - durden0 7y ago
      This makes more sense to me then all the talk about CDN's. CDN's don't solve all problems.
  - sassifrass 7y ago
    It’s true that getting video “right” can be extremely challenging, but it’s worth noting that Disney has quite significant previous experience here, including at massive scale. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAMTech [2] https://www.fastcompany.com/90373706/hbos-tech-is-prepping-att-for-the-streaming-wars https://www.fastcompany.com/90373706/hbos-tech-is-prepping-a...
    - selebrazin 7y ago
      A small correction: Disney+ launched in the Netherlands in September 2019 [1] which was treated as a public test. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/12/20862167/free-disney-plus-hands-on-pilot-marvel https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/12/20862167/free-disney-plus...
      - riffraff 7y ago
        Wow, then today does sound like a botched launch.
      - davedx 7y ago
        Yep we've been watching it in the Netherlands for the last couple of weeks. Been working pretty well to be honest...
    - JaRail 7y ago
      It's not the worst idea. If they had performance problems in multiple regions, their engineers would be chasing peak hours around the clock. If they focus on NA first, they can at least get some sleep at the end of the day.
  - bluedevil2k 7y ago
    Buying Netflix? I think Netflix is going to start a steady decline as the content owners continually pull their stuff from Netflix for their own streaming services. The Netflix original stuff, let's be honest, is hit or miss, with most of the movies being a hard miss.
    - baddox 7y ago
      I don't have much of a problem with Netflix content, but it's the price that just doesn't make sense. They charge extra for UHD, and that premium plan costs more than HBO (which is probably still the king of content quality, though with a crappy 1080p stream) and over twice as much as Disney+ and Apple TV+ (which don't charge extra for UHD).
      - nickthegreek 7y ago
        The plan that offers UHD also offer multiple screens. It it is a legitimate way for customers to pay to stream multiple things at the same time. So while it costs around the same as the HBO plan, it offers something that some other services do no. Apple TV+ allows family sharing, but I dont know about Disney+.
        baddox 7y ago
        FYI, the "Standard" Netflix plan offers 2 simultaneous streams in HD for $12.99 per month in the US. The "Premium" plan offers 4 simultaneous streams in UHD for $15.99 per month. But anyway, I only have one screen, so it's still the case that Netflix charges considerably more just to receive UHD content. As price discrimination goes, that's a pretty scummy way to do it. They've shot and produced this content in UHD, yet they give a much lower quality version to their base customers. I know they have every right to do that, and it might make business sense for them (since people with UHD TVs probably have more disposable income), but it has always felt scummy to me.
        bryanlarsen 7y ago
        Netflix's costs are higher for UHD streaming: storage, bandwidth, production, et cetera. What's scummy about it?
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    > which may be Netflix's only prayer 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?
    - dewey 7y ago
      Because Disney has a huge back catalog that they can use in the coming years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault) would be one reason for that (and a lot of nostalgia).
      - endorphone 7y ago
        A bunch of old movies that everyone has seen a hundred times, probably have on DVD, Blu-ray, and in all likelyhood mp4 form. Eh. The Disney "Vault" thing seems like it's a gimmick that is pretty threadbare now.
        dewey 7y ago
        It’s not just about the existing movies. It’s about owning the franchises and licenses to them.
      - wolco 7y ago
        With 10% of netflix customers volume but how many will drop netflix of that number for disney? Disney will do fine so will netflix. Plenty of room for both.
        cookiecaper 7y ago
        Disney has [more] skin in the game now and will always give their own service highly preferential treatment. This isn't just about Mickey Mouse -- Disney owns many other major content producers. Personally, I've been hearing people complain about Disney-owned content disappearing from Netflix for more than a year already. I'm sure they'll continue to license something to third-party streaming platforms, but they'll do their darnedest to make sure that if consumers are only going to choose one streaming service, it'll be one they control and operate. It's nothing against Netflix itself -- they're one of the tech companies I admire the most. But they're stuck depending on relatively-short-term license agreements to offer most of the content that people are willing to pay for. Whether or not the consumer is willing to pay for multiple streaming services, the media companies are going to be much less willing to make the content available outside of their own little streamer. This means rough seas ahead for Netflix.
  - mantoto 7y ago
    Why would that be hard? Distributing a limited amount of static content around the world sounds reasonable easy to me.
  - jonwachob91 7y ago
    >>> 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 owned!
    - a-wu 7y ago
      ESPN's streaming is one of the worst ones I've ever used. It is constantly buffering on my 275 Mbps downlink and every other time it has issues with authenticating to my provider.
      - jonwachob91 7y ago
        Wow. That is interesting. I haven't used ESPN's streaming platform in about a year (since they did that switch and stopped including streaming in cable packages). But I used to stream European Soccer games on my second monitor at work virtually every day. My work internet was maybe 75 mbps and it worked fine.
        casefields 7y ago
        It’s gotta be location dependent. I’m in Los Angeles and have never had a single issue with ESPN, even going back to the ESPN3/WatchESPN days.
        a-wu 7y ago
        I actually used to have better service when WatchESPN was standalone. When they started integrating into the main ESPN site (and new player) it started declining for me.
      - mikelbring 7y ago
        I have noticed ESPN works way better on my Roku than my Xbox. A lot of the apps do. I use to think it was just ESPN but started to notice this.
  - btables 7y ago
    Disney bought one of the most successful video streaming companies in the world to drive Disney+ called Bamtech, they didn't start from scratch at all - https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2017/08/08/disney-accelerates-purchase-of-bamtech-espn-disney-will-see-new-digital-streaming-media-apps/#7d347ddc4a5d https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2017/08/08/disney-ac...
  - scarface74 7y ago
    The logical conclusion, of course, is that Disney should've just bought Netflix 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.
  - dylanjha 7y ago
    > Video is hard to get right, with quirks across many combinations of platform/device/OS/browser version/video card/playback resolution/format features 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?
  - JPKab 7y ago
    Came home today, and my wife had Disney + set up and running. Son was watching the awful Phantom Menace movie, and unfortunately it was working like a charm. 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.
  - swasheck 7y ago
    Broad device support is also a large factor that favors Netflix. We have children who range from 3-14 and Disney has something for all of them - except support for the devices we have. Our TV is an older (NetCast) LG, we “only” have a Wii-U, and we don’t have old computer hardware just laying around. Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Google Play, YouTube support our TV. Not Disney+. Looks like we’re gonna do our one week and then wait for a while.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    > The logical conclusion, of course, is that Disney should've just bought Netflix 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.
  - Mindwipe 7y ago
    The actual streaming delivery seemed to go okay yesterday, they have enough CDN peering. It was the authentication services that had issues. Those are fairly common day one problems for lots of online services that are fixable. I'm not sure some day one capacity issues would justify the enormous expensive of buying NF tbh.
- riazrizvi 7y ago
  It breaks when you hit the main CTA button to start a free trial now. I don’t understand how a company with billions of dollars in resources can fail to solve such a well trodden problem. Even if there were a billion users on day 1. I wonder if the problem is due to an abdication of parts of the engineering problem, an over reliance on 3rd party services, that meant that no-one in the engineering team was able to study the whole engineering problem from first principles, which would result in inadequate fail overs.
  - berdon 7y ago
    "well trodden problem" does not make it any easier. Scaling is hard. For everyone. Testing that scaling works is harder.
    - sterileopinions 7y ago
      >"well trodden problem" does not make it any easier. Yes it does.
      - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
        I have to agree with sterileopinions here. The fact that it's been done multiple times before means you know a lot about how hard it will be, the necessary resources, and can learn from past mistakes. That doesn't make it easy. But it definitely makes it easier. To say otherwise is to argue that experience isn't useful.
        sterileopinions 7y ago
        Thank you.
        pilsetnieks 7y ago
        > The fact that it's been done multiple times before means you know a lot about how hard it will be, the necessary resources, and can learn from past mistakes. "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
- dwoozle 7y ago
  But these guys knew the kind of volume they would have on Day 1, and have the resources to get it right, and the brand value to protect. It’s not like a startup that grows like crazy.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- testplzignore 7y ago
  Disney+ is arguably the largest software release of all time in terms of scale. My estimate is that they will be handling 1-2% of all internet traffic by the end of the week. 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.
  - ThePadawan 7y ago
    OK - so if it is so obvious that you can't scale from 0 to 100 on launch day, why not anticipate that? 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?
    - ssully 7y ago
      I've never handled a project like this, but I feel like the goal should be to meet what average demand will be once the high demand of the first few days goes down. No one is going to remember that they couldn't login to Disney+ on the first day as long as the experience on the second and going forward is strong.
      - basch 7y ago
        Plus, its free press. "Disney+ so popular at launch it was hard to get into for a couple hours." Meanwhile, as people are getting home from work and reading that headline, and Disney+ now works.
        makr17 7y ago
        "You loved us so much you broke us."
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      OK - so if it is so obvious that you can't scale from 0 to 100 on launch day, why not anticipate that? I imagine the gigantic Arctic cold front passing over the East Coast right now created a much larger demand than they were expecting on a non-holiday Tuesday morning while school is (supposed to be) in session.
- tootie 7y ago
  I logged in early this morning and nothing was working but it was up an running within maybe an hour. It's almost more impressive that they had an unintended service interruption so quickly and recovered right away.
  - dangerboysteve 7y ago
    I signed up an hour ago for the trial. There were some minor hiccups but I was able to download some stuff.
- jonplackett 7y ago
  This would seem a fair assessment if it were not for my experience using Disney Life, their old streaming service. It has been out for years and is generally terrible. - 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.
- draw_down 7y ago
  Right, which is why I was surprised they went with a big-bang launch, as opposed to bringing smaller cohorts of users online. However, from what I read, they tested it in smaller countries first, so maybe that wouldn't have helped much.
- lmilcin 7y ago
  This could have been avoided if the service was introduced slowly. Big launch days planned months in advance don't really play well with software development reality. 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.
  - ragebol 7y ago
    They launched in the Netherlands some 2 month ago, I've had no issues.
- markdown 7y ago
  Meh, this was easily prevented simply by not promoting it so much. They should have done a staggered rollout country by country starting with the smaller countries and adding on a country or two every day.
- darkerside 7y ago
  This is probably one of the big reasons for rolling out with a beta or invite only soft open. The ability to control growth while also building hype.
- ragebol 7y ago
  I've been using Disney+ since they pre-launced in the Netherlands for the last ca. 2 months IIRC, without any issue what so ever. But then again: NL is a small country.
  - mcv 7y ago
    I've had issues getting it to Chromecast. Fortunately they released the app for Samsung TVs last week. That helps a lot. Now there's only the issue that that app was suddenly logged out for no clear reason. Let's hope that doesn't happen again.
- jamil7 7y ago
  Not surprising at all, what is surprising to me is that companies still insist on doing the "Big Reveal" style launches. Why not open it up gradually in phases via a beta program or something?
  - Mindwipe 7y ago
    It's hard in this case when the release schedule is so heavily based around expiring licensing agreements for content elsewhere tbf.
  - mcv 7y ago
    They did that to some extent. I've had Disney+ for about a month now. But going from a few people in a small country to a billion people all at once is still a massive change.
skrebbel 7y ago
To be fair, this wasn't launch day. Disney+ has been around in The Netherlands for quite a while now
- EpicEng 7y ago
  Sure... But it's a country of 17M. More people than that probably signed up today.
thinkingkong 7y ago
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.
- stefan_ 7y ago
  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.
  - jld 7y ago
    Disney also operates Hulu.
    - durden0 7y ago
      I thought they were a partial investor/owner, not an operator.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - jld 7y ago
        They are the operator and majority shareholder, and have agreed to purchase the rest of the shares from Comcast by 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/14/media/disney-buys-comcast-hul.. https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/14/media/disney-buys-comcast-hul....
    - intpx 7y ago
      Ah that explains it. they must have put their UI/UX people in charge of infra
  - BryantD 7y ago
    BAMTech has had high volume days, obviously, but on reflection I couldn't think of any service launch they powered that'd be bigger than this. WWE, HBO relaunch, NHL, MLB -- none seem likely to generate as much demand as this.
mixxit 7y ago
do they use kubernetes?
- gbrayut 7y ago
  apparently not at launch https://twitter.com/rothgar/status/1194150447604355072 https://twitter.com/rothgar/status/1194150447604355072
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  I could only find something about them generally using kubernetes (from 2017) https://www.linux.com/news/how-disney-realizing-multi-cloud-promise-kubernetes/ https://www.linux.com/news/how-disney-realizing-multi-cloud-... Is there any recent article discussing the tech behind Disney+ specifically?
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  I would be surprised if they did. Kubernetes takes a long time to build up internal expertise around, whereas I imagine the mouse can throw money at AWS all day.
- clvx 7y ago
  Bamtech is heavily based on ECS and other AWS services.
dgritsko 7y ago
> "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 doubt we'd see a replacement.
- futhey 7y ago
  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.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    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.
    - briffle 7y ago
      Honestly, I want it to be more like Music. I can choose whichever streaming music company I want and get 99.9% of the same music, because they have standard fees they pay each other, etc. Streaming Video is incredibly fragmented. It's honestly frustrating. I don't want to subscribe to 5 services. I currently have Hulu+Live, and it has ESPN, and lots of other channels I like, but doesn't have the local Fox station, or the local ABC station (only the national fox news and abc news). Excessive Fragmentation is going to cause everyone to go back to pirating stuff, like they did before Netflix made it too cheap and easy to bother.
cycop 7y ago
How can you be unprepared for the load? They would have and should have expected and tested for the load on launch day.
- twobat 7y ago
  I also think a glitch in the launch day counts as 100 glitches on any other day.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Well, it doesn't necessarily make sense to be prepared. 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+.
  - dwoozle 7y ago
    That’s not the kind of thinking that really works for a brand with such massive consumer trust as Disney. You’re talking about a brand worth $100-200 billion, you don’t just “Take an L.”
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      Why not? How many customers do you think Disney lost for its morning disruptions? I'd guess basically zero.
      - dwoozle 7y ago
        That kind of thinking isn’t how top brands are built. Lexus doesn’t lose any customers if the scan button on the LS400 radio is a little fiddly, but that kind of thinking will poison a brand.
- KindOne 7y ago
  Probably compounded by the fact that a bunch of schools closed in the midwest and northeast because of the snow.
gfodor 7y ago
The Mouse must flow. Seriously tho, I'd imagine this was a heck of a big lift.
baddox 7y ago
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.
- xenospn 7y ago
  Maybe you’re the one who broke it by scrubbing too much ;)
jboggan 7y ago
My Facebook feed this morning was filled with friends at home watching Disney+ with their children because of the snow days closing schools across the country. I know scaling a service on Day 1 is difficult but I imagine their load is much higher than expected.
- mucle6 7y ago
  If a snow day is enough to overload their servers, I don't think they would stand a chance on the weekends.
  - codycraven 7y ago
    It's a day one launch of a huge product. I'd imagine they chose a Tuesday release so that they could have time to understand their own scaling issues before the weekend, a freak cold front seemed to sabotage that grace period and yet they responded well. 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.
Qwertystop 7y ago
On the one hand, of course launch day of a big service is going to have problems; they always do. 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?
- Hamuko 7y ago
  Pretty sure it's not built on top of Hulu. They bought a majority in BAMTech way before getting Hulu.
  - dwoozle 7y ago
    Hulu is dogshit technically, I would hope that Disney+ doesn’t hit a line of Hulu code.
    - milesokeefe 7y ago
      What technical issues/deficiencies have you seen with Hulu?
      - crooked-v 7y ago
        On Apple TV I run into constant "cannot be played" errors that go away after hitting the menu button and reslecting the same item.
      - dwoozle 7y ago
        Forgotten positions in videos, forgotten ad load histories, terrible app UX, app hanging, buffering delays when scrubbing.
    - mrlala 7y ago
      I use Hulu basically every day- absolutely on par with netflix from all of my experiences.
- kpU8efre7r 7y ago
shmerl 7y ago
And of course, they are so obsessed with DRM, that it doesn't work on Linux. What else to expect from Disney.
- nyuszika7h 7y ago
  It's probably because Widevine on Linux doesn't support VMP. But even Amazon Prime Video streams in SD on Linux, better than nothing but still a bad experience for users.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    Whatever it is, it's simply dumb and totally Disney style.
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      Is it dumb though? Why should they care about Linux users? Really, how does it make sense for them to spend time on it?
      - shmerl 7y ago
        It sure is, because it will be broken and pirated either way. So what did they achieve? They simply lost paying customers, nothing more. It totally makes no sense to spend any time and resources on DRM. Instead, they should start offering video DRM-free for sale, not just for rent. The reasons they are pushing this junk are political. As was well explained here: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree_movies/post499 https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree... Also, surprising to see so many here on HN endorsing DRM junk and those who push it on everyone.
        papln 7y ago
        If you don't like DRM, why do you want to buy/rent Disney stuff from the company that invented and bribed Congress to create modern Draconian copyright law?
jl6 7y ago
I cannot imagine any org being able to pull off such a large scale launch as one single event. Makes me wonder why they didn’t try to phase it by offering “insider” access, trial periods, limited invites, etc. like Gmail did back when it launched.
- dwoozle 7y ago
  They did do all that.
pastor_elm 7y ago
"Who knew hosting could be so complicated?" - Mickey Mouse
- tabtab 7y ago
  Some goofy coder did a mickey mouse software job.
NicoJuicy 7y ago
Why would they want to be fully working on day 1. At day 5, yes. But before that, it's great marketing: Our platform is too popular to handle demand currently, is the message
- crooked-v 7y ago
  Also, launching on a Tuesday is a great way to get people to hammer on the service for a few days before 'seriously' using it for 'movie night' on a Friday or Saturday.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    At least, it would have been, if not for the massive early winter storm currently barreling across the Midwest.
cryptozeus 7y ago
They said on Twitter that launch exceeded their wildest imagination :) I guess this is a good problem to have. Also if you see twitter feed, those issues were fixed pretty quickly so my guess is this was just a unintentional ddos on their servers due to launch. As people dropped off, it released those locks. Anyone has idea on their tech stack ? Are they using cloud?
jonplackett 7y ago
Anyone who’s used their old streaming service Disney Life will be very, very, very unsurprised by this.
JadoJodo 7y ago
I wonder if this is the cause of the error I've seen: Error Code 83. There doesn't seem to be an official help page for this error.
- dstaley 7y ago
  No, code 83 occurs when your device doesn't support the level of Widevine DRM used by Disney+.
not2b 7y ago
I got that error screen this morning. I guess they'll get it sorted out soon.
spike021 7y ago
Managed to download the Apple TV app and watch the first episode of The Mandalorian last night when it released early. Watching that episode was completely smooth at the time. But later while just browsing I found several issues. Some content curation related, like one or two shows only having a single season listed, but multiple seasons' worth of episodes assigned to that single season. Also, the queuing system (adding shows/movies to the watchlist or w/e they call it) didn't seem to work; the check mark showed after selecting it for each item, but nothing would actually come up on the queue page.
lordnacho 7y ago
One thing I haven't heard is how DisneyLife fits into this. I use it at the moment for my kids and it has all the stuff you expect from Disney, basically the animated movies like a Frozen and Moana. 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.
- madrox 7y ago
  Hello! Former engineering director for DisneyLife here. Most of the team wasn't allowed to move to Disney+ and have since moved on. The DisneyLife journey would make a great book, but doesn't really fit into a HN comment. 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.
  - CountSessine 7y ago
    Have you ever considered writing a blog about your experiences there? What little you did write here in the response about DisneyLife is actually how I think Disney+ is going to turn out (small team, underfunded, demoralized, forced to license 3rd rate tech based on external mandates, etc).
    - madrox 7y ago
      Maybe one day when I can feel more analytical about it. This is a weird day for me, as you can imagine. Also, lots of people I know and like have put a lot of time into Disney+. I don't want to take away from what they're trying to accomplish right now.
cwkoss 7y ago
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.
- mike_hock 7y ago
  > Make the moral choice and pirate their content instead of giving them your money to fund further overreach. ... if you absolutely must have their crap in the first place.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Why make it nasty like that? If you’ve got a moral objection why do you need to criticise them personally like that as well? I don’t understand why people feel the need to be so aggressive.
  - cwkoss 7y ago
    Tangential, but does anyone know of good hardware to function as a standalone HDMI output video server? I've been wanting to play with making a 'plug and play' box that I could give to kids/grandparents in my life who don't have the technical skills to pirate for themselves, preloaded with content I think is good and they'd enjoy. 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.
    - proverbialbunny 7y ago
      Arguably, buying a smart tv is the cheapest way to go. There is the Pi 4, which once all the parts and shipping are put together about $80. Though, eh.. imho it's better if you get one of the Intel Nucs. They can be had for around $200 and are quite good.
      - 7y ago
soulofmischief 7y ago
Gee, smart thing to do would have been, I dunno, a rolling beta?
intrnttrll 7y ago
Can't help but remember that just a few days ago, when disney PR was ramping up all over social media, the top comment was praising Iger and how great of a CTO he was and what a great tech company Disney was... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466940
aprdm 7y ago
All and all seems like a pretty successful launch. Massive scale and issues seemed to be resolved pretty quickly, props to the team ! I am very curious about the future of Netflix as Disney has way more content and deeper pockets.
rawoke083600 7y ago
Ja a good rule/tip I learned about scaling: Everyone knows their first bottleneck... be the the db, the search service or the webserver... very few ppl know their SECOND bottleneck. Sometimes the first bottleneck is fixed suddenly(new upgrade, fixed config) but few people knows their second item in the chain that's the bottleneck and get hit by this in production.
magoon 7y ago
This is overblown. Disney+ was mostly fine all day for everybody I know. I consider it a successful launch by any measure.
Jaruzel 7y ago
Us poor UK based people wouldn't know... it's not launching here until March 2020 (As Sky still have a licence for Disney content until then). Elsewhere I've read that Disney+ has some pretty agressive anti-VPN detection, so you can't bypass the location lock-in either. 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.
mcv 7y ago
They also had glitches before launch day. I've had Disney+ for about a month (nice of them to use Netherland as their try-out region), and one of the first things I tried was chromecast some old Spiderman cartoons (because my youngest son is a fan). Those that had Dutch translations either failed to play, or failed when I tried to cast them. English-only ones worked fine most of the time. 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.
romanovcode 7y ago
AWS, Google Cloud and Azure were all having problems yesterday in Europe. Maybe that was the reason.

232 points by zafar1 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cookiecaper 7y ago
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.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  >I'd expect them to have continuous issues for the first 3-6 months I don't think it will be anywhere close to that long. Disney already has plenty of experience in streaming video (BAMtech / Hulu).
- geerlingguy 7y ago
  The sad thing is they're having issues with loading login pages, authenticating via API, app API backend routes... pretty much every layer of their app stack and that's _before_ any video can be streamed to end users. 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).
  - buckminster 7y ago
    It makes some sense if it's the user onboarding that's failing. That's the one part that should see much less traffic in normal operation.
  - awill 7y ago
    That's actually the hard part. Video streaming is easy, and done with CDNs.
    - Slartie 7y ago
      Sure, handing over giant checks to Akamai is easy, but it becomes a lot harder if you do the CDN part yourself. Like all the really big streaming video providers do, because otherwise they wouldn't be competitive at scale.
    - Mindwipe 7y ago
      Well, it's not "easy", at Netflix scale. Lots of Netflix traffic is done via local caching servers at ISPs as CDN delivery isn't reliable enough. Minimising playback latency is really, really hard and NF do very well here. Robust geofiltering in those scenarios is hard if you're trying to check the video essence and not just the license. Having said that, there are a lot of reasonably mature solutions in the market to address many of these points, and it doesn't appear that was the issue yesterday.
  - durden0 7y ago
    This makes more sense to me then all the talk about CDN's. CDN's don't solve all problems.
- sassifrass 7y ago
  It’s true that getting video “right” can be extremely challenging, but it’s worth noting that Disney has quite significant previous experience here, including at massive scale. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAMTech [2] https://www.fastcompany.com/90373706/hbos-tech-is-prepping-att-for-the-streaming-wars https://www.fastcompany.com/90373706/hbos-tech-is-prepping-a...
  - selebrazin 7y ago
    A small correction: Disney+ launched in the Netherlands in September 2019 [1] which was treated as a public test. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/12/20862167/free-disney-plus-hands-on-pilot-marvel https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/12/20862167/free-disney-plus...
    - riffraff 7y ago
      Wow, then today does sound like a botched launch.
    - davedx 7y ago
      Yep we've been watching it in the Netherlands for the last couple of weeks. Been working pretty well to be honest...
  - JaRail 7y ago
    It's not the worst idea. If they had performance problems in multiple regions, their engineers would be chasing peak hours around the clock. If they focus on NA first, they can at least get some sleep at the end of the day.
- bluedevil2k 7y ago
  Buying Netflix? I think Netflix is going to start a steady decline as the content owners continually pull their stuff from Netflix for their own streaming services. The Netflix original stuff, let's be honest, is hit or miss, with most of the movies being a hard miss.
  - baddox 7y ago
    I don't have much of a problem with Netflix content, but it's the price that just doesn't make sense. They charge extra for UHD, and that premium plan costs more than HBO (which is probably still the king of content quality, though with a crappy 1080p stream) and over twice as much as Disney+ and Apple TV+ (which don't charge extra for UHD).
    - nickthegreek 7y ago
      The plan that offers UHD also offer multiple screens. It it is a legitimate way for customers to pay to stream multiple things at the same time. So while it costs around the same as the HBO plan, it offers something that some other services do no. Apple TV+ allows family sharing, but I dont know about Disney+.
      - baddox 7y ago
        FYI, the "Standard" Netflix plan offers 2 simultaneous streams in HD for $12.99 per month in the US. The "Premium" plan offers 4 simultaneous streams in UHD for $15.99 per month. But anyway, I only have one screen, so it's still the case that Netflix charges considerably more just to receive UHD content. As price discrimination goes, that's a pretty scummy way to do it. They've shot and produced this content in UHD, yet they give a much lower quality version to their base customers. I know they have every right to do that, and it might make business sense for them (since people with UHD TVs probably have more disposable income), but it has always felt scummy to me.
        bryanlarsen 7y ago
        Netflix's costs are higher for UHD streaming: storage, bandwidth, production, et cetera. What's scummy about it?
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  > which may be Netflix's only prayer 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?
  - dewey 7y ago
    Because Disney has a huge back catalog that they can use in the coming years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault) would be one reason for that (and a lot of nostalgia).
    - endorphone 7y ago
      A bunch of old movies that everyone has seen a hundred times, probably have on DVD, Blu-ray, and in all likelyhood mp4 form. Eh. The Disney "Vault" thing seems like it's a gimmick that is pretty threadbare now.
      - dewey 7y ago
        It’s not just about the existing movies. It’s about owning the franchises and licenses to them.
    - wolco 7y ago
      With 10% of netflix customers volume but how many will drop netflix of that number for disney? Disney will do fine so will netflix. Plenty of room for both.
      - cookiecaper 7y ago
        Disney has [more] skin in the game now and will always give their own service highly preferential treatment. This isn't just about Mickey Mouse -- Disney owns many other major content producers. Personally, I've been hearing people complain about Disney-owned content disappearing from Netflix for more than a year already. I'm sure they'll continue to license something to third-party streaming platforms, but they'll do their darnedest to make sure that if consumers are only going to choose one streaming service, it'll be one they control and operate. It's nothing against Netflix itself -- they're one of the tech companies I admire the most. But they're stuck depending on relatively-short-term license agreements to offer most of the content that people are willing to pay for. Whether or not the consumer is willing to pay for multiple streaming services, the media companies are going to be much less willing to make the content available outside of their own little streamer. This means rough seas ahead for Netflix.
- mantoto 7y ago
  Why would that be hard? Distributing a limited amount of static content around the world sounds reasonable easy to me.
- jonwachob91 7y ago
  >>> 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 owned!
  - a-wu 7y ago
    ESPN's streaming is one of the worst ones I've ever used. It is constantly buffering on my 275 Mbps downlink and every other time it has issues with authenticating to my provider.
    - jonwachob91 7y ago
      Wow. That is interesting. I haven't used ESPN's streaming platform in about a year (since they did that switch and stopped including streaming in cable packages). But I used to stream European Soccer games on my second monitor at work virtually every day. My work internet was maybe 75 mbps and it worked fine.
      - casefields 7y ago
        It’s gotta be location dependent. I’m in Los Angeles and have never had a single issue with ESPN, even going back to the ESPN3/WatchESPN days.
        a-wu 7y ago
        I actually used to have better service when WatchESPN was standalone. When they started integrating into the main ESPN site (and new player) it started declining for me.
    - mikelbring 7y ago
      I have noticed ESPN works way better on my Roku than my Xbox. A lot of the apps do. I use to think it was just ESPN but started to notice this.
- btables 7y ago
  Disney bought one of the most successful video streaming companies in the world to drive Disney+ called Bamtech, they didn't start from scratch at all - https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2017/08/08/disney-accelerates-purchase-of-bamtech-espn-disney-will-see-new-digital-streaming-media-apps/#7d347ddc4a5d https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2017/08/08/disney-ac...
- scarface74 7y ago
  The logical conclusion, of course, is that Disney should've just bought Netflix 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.
- dylanjha 7y ago
  > Video is hard to get right, with quirks across many combinations of platform/device/OS/browser version/video card/playback resolution/format features 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?
- JPKab 7y ago
  Came home today, and my wife had Disney + set up and running. Son was watching the awful Phantom Menace movie, and unfortunately it was working like a charm. 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.
- swasheck 7y ago
  Broad device support is also a large factor that favors Netflix. We have children who range from 3-14 and Disney has something for all of them - except support for the devices we have. Our TV is an older (NetCast) LG, we “only” have a Wii-U, and we don’t have old computer hardware just laying around. Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Google Play, YouTube support our TV. Not Disney+. Looks like we’re gonna do our one week and then wait for a while.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  > The logical conclusion, of course, is that Disney should've just bought Netflix 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.
- Mindwipe 7y ago
  The actual streaming delivery seemed to go okay yesterday, they have enough CDN peering. It was the authentication services that had issues. Those are fairly common day one problems for lots of online services that are fixable. I'm not sure some day one capacity issues would justify the enormous expensive of buying NF tbh.
riazrizvi 7y ago
It breaks when you hit the main CTA button to start a free trial now. I don’t understand how a company with billions of dollars in resources can fail to solve such a well trodden problem. Even if there were a billion users on day 1. I wonder if the problem is due to an abdication of parts of the engineering problem, an over reliance on 3rd party services, that meant that no-one in the engineering team was able to study the whole engineering problem from first principles, which would result in inadequate fail overs.
- berdon 7y ago
  "well trodden problem" does not make it any easier. Scaling is hard. For everyone. Testing that scaling works is harder.
  - sterileopinions 7y ago
    >"well trodden problem" does not make it any easier. Yes it does.
    - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
      I have to agree with sterileopinions here. The fact that it's been done multiple times before means you know a lot about how hard it will be, the necessary resources, and can learn from past mistakes. That doesn't make it easy. But it definitely makes it easier. To say otherwise is to argue that experience isn't useful.
      - sterileopinions 7y ago
        Thank you.
      - pilsetnieks 7y ago
        > The fact that it's been done multiple times before means you know a lot about how hard it will be, the necessary resources, and can learn from past mistakes. "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
dwoozle 7y ago
But these guys knew the kind of volume they would have on Day 1, and have the resources to get it right, and the brand value to protect. It’s not like a startup that grows like crazy.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
testplzignore 7y ago
Disney+ is arguably the largest software release of all time in terms of scale. My estimate is that they will be handling 1-2% of all internet traffic by the end of the week. 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.
- ThePadawan 7y ago
  OK - so if it is so obvious that you can't scale from 0 to 100 on launch day, why not anticipate that? 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?
  - ssully 7y ago
    I've never handled a project like this, but I feel like the goal should be to meet what average demand will be once the high demand of the first few days goes down. No one is going to remember that they couldn't login to Disney+ on the first day as long as the experience on the second and going forward is strong.
    - basch 7y ago
      Plus, its free press. "Disney+ so popular at launch it was hard to get into for a couple hours." Meanwhile, as people are getting home from work and reading that headline, and Disney+ now works.
      - makr17 7y ago
        "You loved us so much you broke us."
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    OK - so if it is so obvious that you can't scale from 0 to 100 on launch day, why not anticipate that? I imagine the gigantic Arctic cold front passing over the East Coast right now created a much larger demand than they were expecting on a non-holiday Tuesday morning while school is (supposed to be) in session.
tootie 7y ago
I logged in early this morning and nothing was working but it was up an running within maybe an hour. It's almost more impressive that they had an unintended service interruption so quickly and recovered right away.
- dangerboysteve 7y ago
  I signed up an hour ago for the trial. There were some minor hiccups but I was able to download some stuff.
jonplackett 7y ago
This would seem a fair assessment if it were not for my experience using Disney Life, their old streaming service. It has been out for years and is generally terrible. - 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.
draw_down 7y ago
Right, which is why I was surprised they went with a big-bang launch, as opposed to bringing smaller cohorts of users online. However, from what I read, they tested it in smaller countries first, so maybe that wouldn't have helped much.
lmilcin 7y ago
This could have been avoided if the service was introduced slowly. Big launch days planned months in advance don't really play well with software development reality. 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.
- ragebol 7y ago
  They launched in the Netherlands some 2 month ago, I've had no issues.
markdown 7y ago
Meh, this was easily prevented simply by not promoting it so much. They should have done a staggered rollout country by country starting with the smaller countries and adding on a country or two every day.
darkerside 7y ago
This is probably one of the big reasons for rolling out with a beta or invite only soft open. The ability to control growth while also building hype.
ragebol 7y ago
I've been using Disney+ since they pre-launced in the Netherlands for the last ca. 2 months IIRC, without any issue what so ever. But then again: NL is a small country.
- mcv 7y ago
  I've had issues getting it to Chromecast. Fortunately they released the app for Samsung TVs last week. That helps a lot. Now there's only the issue that that app was suddenly logged out for no clear reason. Let's hope that doesn't happen again.
jamil7 7y ago
Not surprising at all, what is surprising to me is that companies still insist on doing the "Big Reveal" style launches. Why not open it up gradually in phases via a beta program or something?
- Mindwipe 7y ago
  It's hard in this case when the release schedule is so heavily based around expiring licensing agreements for content elsewhere tbf.
- mcv 7y ago
  They did that to some extent. I've had Disney+ for about a month now. But going from a few people in a small country to a billion people all at once is still a massive change.

skrebbel 7y ago

To be fair, this wasn't launch day. Disney+ has been around in The Netherlands for quite a while now

EpicEng 7y ago
Sure... But it's a country of 17M. More people than that probably signed up today.

thinkingkong 7y ago

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.

stefan_ 7y ago
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.
- jld 7y ago
  Disney also operates Hulu.
  - durden0 7y ago
    I thought they were a partial investor/owner, not an operator.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - jld 7y ago
      They are the operator and majority shareholder, and have agreed to purchase the rest of the shares from Comcast by 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/14/media/disney-buys-comcast-hul.. https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/14/media/disney-buys-comcast-hul....
  - intpx 7y ago
    Ah that explains it. they must have put their UI/UX people in charge of infra
- BryantD 7y ago
  BAMTech has had high volume days, obviously, but on reflection I couldn't think of any service launch they powered that'd be bigger than this. WWE, HBO relaunch, NHL, MLB -- none seem likely to generate as much demand as this.

mixxit 7y ago

do they use kubernetes?

gbrayut 7y ago
apparently not at launch https://twitter.com/rothgar/status/1194150447604355072 https://twitter.com/rothgar/status/1194150447604355072
diffeomorphism 7y ago
I could only find something about them generally using kubernetes (from 2017) https://www.linux.com/news/how-disney-realizing-multi-cloud-promise-kubernetes/ https://www.linux.com/news/how-disney-realizing-multi-cloud-... Is there any recent article discussing the tech behind Disney+ specifically?
vorpalhex 7y ago
I would be surprised if they did. Kubernetes takes a long time to build up internal expertise around, whereas I imagine the mouse can throw money at AWS all day.
clvx 7y ago
Bamtech is heavily based on ECS and other AWS services.

dgritsko 7y ago

> "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 doubt we'd see a replacement.

futhey 7y ago
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.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  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.
  - briffle 7y ago
    Honestly, I want it to be more like Music. I can choose whichever streaming music company I want and get 99.9% of the same music, because they have standard fees they pay each other, etc. Streaming Video is incredibly fragmented. It's honestly frustrating. I don't want to subscribe to 5 services. I currently have Hulu+Live, and it has ESPN, and lots of other channels I like, but doesn't have the local Fox station, or the local ABC station (only the national fox news and abc news). Excessive Fragmentation is going to cause everyone to go back to pirating stuff, like they did before Netflix made it too cheap and easy to bother.

cycop 7y ago

How can you be unprepared for the load? They would have and should have expected and tested for the load on launch day.

twobat 7y ago
I also think a glitch in the launch day counts as 100 glitches on any other day.
hombre_fatal 7y ago
Well, it doesn't necessarily make sense to be prepared. 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+.
- dwoozle 7y ago
  That’s not the kind of thinking that really works for a brand with such massive consumer trust as Disney. You’re talking about a brand worth $100-200 billion, you don’t just “Take an L.”
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    Why not? How many customers do you think Disney lost for its morning disruptions? I'd guess basically zero.
    - dwoozle 7y ago
      That kind of thinking isn’t how top brands are built. Lexus doesn’t lose any customers if the scan button on the LS400 radio is a little fiddly, but that kind of thinking will poison a brand.
KindOne 7y ago
Probably compounded by the fact that a bunch of schools closed in the midwest and northeast because of the snow.

gfodor 7y ago

The Mouse must flow. Seriously tho, I'd imagine this was a heck of a big lift.

baddox 7y ago

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.

xenospn 7y ago
Maybe you’re the one who broke it by scrubbing too much ;)

jboggan 7y ago

My Facebook feed this morning was filled with friends at home watching Disney+ with their children because of the snow days closing schools across the country. I know scaling a service on Day 1 is difficult but I imagine their load is much higher than expected.

mucle6 7y ago
If a snow day is enough to overload their servers, I don't think they would stand a chance on the weekends.
- codycraven 7y ago
  It's a day one launch of a huge product. I'd imagine they chose a Tuesday release so that they could have time to understand their own scaling issues before the weekend, a freak cold front seemed to sabotage that grace period and yet they responded well. 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.

Qwertystop 7y ago

On the one hand, of course launch day of a big service is going to have problems; they always do. 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?

Hamuko 7y ago
Pretty sure it's not built on top of Hulu. They bought a majority in BAMTech way before getting Hulu.
- dwoozle 7y ago
  Hulu is dogshit technically, I would hope that Disney+ doesn’t hit a line of Hulu code.
  - milesokeefe 7y ago
    What technical issues/deficiencies have you seen with Hulu?
    - crooked-v 7y ago
      On Apple TV I run into constant "cannot be played" errors that go away after hitting the menu button and reslecting the same item.
    - dwoozle 7y ago
      Forgotten positions in videos, forgotten ad load histories, terrible app UX, app hanging, buffering delays when scrubbing.
  - mrlala 7y ago
    I use Hulu basically every day- absolutely on par with netflix from all of my experiences.
kpU8efre7r 7y ago

shmerl 7y ago

And of course, they are so obsessed with DRM, that it doesn't work on Linux. What else to expect from Disney.

nyuszika7h 7y ago
It's probably because Widevine on Linux doesn't support VMP. But even Amazon Prime Video streams in SD on Linux, better than nothing but still a bad experience for users.
- shmerl 7y ago
  Whatever it is, it's simply dumb and totally Disney style.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    Is it dumb though? Why should they care about Linux users? Really, how does it make sense for them to spend time on it?
    - shmerl 7y ago
      It sure is, because it will be broken and pirated either way. So what did they achieve? They simply lost paying customers, nothing more. It totally makes no sense to spend any time and resources on DRM. Instead, they should start offering video DRM-free for sale, not just for rent. The reasons they are pushing this junk are political. As was well explained here: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree_movies/post499 https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree... Also, surprising to see so many here on HN endorsing DRM junk and those who push it on everyone.
      - papln 7y ago
        If you don't like DRM, why do you want to buy/rent Disney stuff from the company that invented and bribed Congress to create modern Draconian copyright law?

jl6 7y ago

I cannot imagine any org being able to pull off such a large scale launch as one single event. Makes me wonder why they didn’t try to phase it by offering “insider” access, trial periods, limited invites, etc. like Gmail did back when it launched.

dwoozle 7y ago
They did do all that.

pastor_elm 7y ago

"Who knew hosting could be so complicated?" - Mickey Mouse

tabtab 7y ago
Some goofy coder did a mickey mouse software job.

NicoJuicy 7y ago

Why would they want to be fully working on day 1. At day 5, yes. But before that, it's great marketing: Our platform is too popular to handle demand currently, is the message

crooked-v 7y ago
Also, launching on a Tuesday is a great way to get people to hammer on the service for a few days before 'seriously' using it for 'movie night' on a Friday or Saturday.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  At least, it would have been, if not for the massive early winter storm currently barreling across the Midwest.

cryptozeus 7y ago

They said on Twitter that launch exceeded their wildest imagination :) I guess this is a good problem to have. Also if you see twitter feed, those issues were fixed pretty quickly so my guess is this was just a unintentional ddos on their servers due to launch. As people dropped off, it released those locks. Anyone has idea on their tech stack ? Are they using cloud?

jonplackett 7y ago

Anyone who’s used their old streaming service Disney Life will be very, very, very unsurprised by this.

JadoJodo 7y ago

I wonder if this is the cause of the error I've seen: Error Code 83. There doesn't seem to be an official help page for this error.

dstaley 7y ago
No, code 83 occurs when your device doesn't support the level of Widevine DRM used by Disney+.

not2b 7y ago

I got that error screen this morning. I guess they'll get it sorted out soon.

spike021 7y ago

Managed to download the Apple TV app and watch the first episode of The Mandalorian last night when it released early. Watching that episode was completely smooth at the time. But later while just browsing I found several issues. Some content curation related, like one or two shows only having a single season listed, but multiple seasons' worth of episodes assigned to that single season. Also, the queuing system (adding shows/movies to the watchlist or w/e they call it) didn't seem to work; the check mark showed after selecting it for each item, but nothing would actually come up on the queue page.

lordnacho 7y ago

One thing I haven't heard is how DisneyLife fits into this. I use it at the moment for my kids and it has all the stuff you expect from Disney, basically the animated movies like a Frozen and Moana. 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.

madrox 7y ago
Hello! Former engineering director for DisneyLife here. Most of the team wasn't allowed to move to Disney+ and have since moved on. The DisneyLife journey would make a great book, but doesn't really fit into a HN comment. 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.
- CountSessine 7y ago
  Have you ever considered writing a blog about your experiences there? What little you did write here in the response about DisneyLife is actually how I think Disney+ is going to turn out (small team, underfunded, demoralized, forced to license 3rd rate tech based on external mandates, etc).
  - madrox 7y ago
    Maybe one day when I can feel more analytical about it. This is a weird day for me, as you can imagine. Also, lots of people I know and like have put a lot of time into Disney+. I don't want to take away from what they're trying to accomplish right now.

cwkoss 7y ago

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.

mike_hock 7y ago
> Make the moral choice and pirate their content instead of giving them your money to fund further overreach. ... if you absolutely must have their crap in the first place.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Why make it nasty like that? If you’ve got a moral objection why do you need to criticise them personally like that as well? I don’t understand why people feel the need to be so aggressive.
- cwkoss 7y ago
  Tangential, but does anyone know of good hardware to function as a standalone HDMI output video server? I've been wanting to play with making a 'plug and play' box that I could give to kids/grandparents in my life who don't have the technical skills to pirate for themselves, preloaded with content I think is good and they'd enjoy. 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.
  - proverbialbunny 7y ago
    Arguably, buying a smart tv is the cheapest way to go. There is the Pi 4, which once all the parts and shipping are put together about $80. Though, eh.. imho it's better if you get one of the Intel Nucs. They can be had for around $200 and are quite good.
    - 7y ago

soulofmischief 7y ago

Gee, smart thing to do would have been, I dunno, a rolling beta?

intrnttrll 7y ago

Can't help but remember that just a few days ago, when disney PR was ramping up all over social media, the top comment was praising Iger and how great of a CTO he was and what a great tech company Disney was... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466940

aprdm 7y ago

All and all seems like a pretty successful launch. Massive scale and issues seemed to be resolved pretty quickly, props to the team ! I am very curious about the future of Netflix as Disney has way more content and deeper pockets.

rawoke083600 7y ago

Ja a good rule/tip I learned about scaling: Everyone knows their first bottleneck... be the the db, the search service or the webserver... very few ppl know their SECOND bottleneck. Sometimes the first bottleneck is fixed suddenly(new upgrade, fixed config) but few people knows their second item in the chain that's the bottleneck and get hit by this in production.

magoon 7y ago

This is overblown. Disney+ was mostly fine all day for everybody I know. I consider it a successful launch by any measure.

Jaruzel 7y ago

Us poor UK based people wouldn't know... it's not launching here until March 2020 (As Sky still have a licence for Disney content until then). Elsewhere I've read that Disney+ has some pretty agressive anti-VPN detection, so you can't bypass the location lock-in either. 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.

mcv 7y ago

They also had glitches before launch day. I've had Disney+ for about a month (nice of them to use Netherland as their try-out region), and one of the first things I tried was chromecast some old Spiderman cartoons (because my youngest son is a fan). Those that had Dutch translations either failed to play, or failed when I tried to cast them. English-only ones worked fine most of the time. 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.

romanovcode 7y ago

AWS, Google Cloud and Azure were all having problems yesterday in Europe. Maybe that was the reason.