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This article was posted when it was new, and I still have the same opinion now as I did then. Why was Netflix putting effort in to supporting a device that the
by wolrah 6y ago
This article was posted when it was new, and I still have the same opinion now as I did then.
Why was Netflix putting effort in to supporting a device that the vendor clearly didn't care about?
This unnamed vendor was, in late 2017, preparing to launch a new device running Android 5.0 which was EoL and had not seen an update since late 2015. Android 8.0 was already out at the time. There is no valid excuse, it's not like they were trying to offer continued support for a legacy device.
In a world that made sense, a company the size of Netflix should have the clout to say "hey hold up here, what are you trying to push this out of date crap for?"
- BuildTheRobots 6y agoI disagree, in fact I have a lot of respect for Netflix for continuing to try and support out of date devices. There's a handful of old tablets and TV boxes that support barely anything these days, but they're still capable of blitting MPEG to screen, so there is still some use in them. As you said though, no respect for vendors pushing out new devices that are EOL before they've even shipped though.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoNetflix's customers are users, not vendors. Just because the vendor doesn't care, doesn't mean the vendor's users don't care. In fact, the vendor and the vendor's users may well have competing interests.
- izacus 6y ago> Why was Netflix putting effort in to supporting a device that the vendor clearly didn't care about? Because they supported a device USERS care about. They were focusing on their customers and user. Why would they punish users for something some random other corpo did?
- JimDabell 6y agoThis was an unreleased product with zero users.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoIrrelevant, you can support EOL products or not. If your company does, you can gain customers but they may not be worth a lot.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoIt's unlikely that Netflix could stop it being released
- tyingq 6y agoThe article mentions it was for a "large European Pay TV company". Having Netflix function on it would be a large group of potential Netflix customers that already had a compatible device hooked up to a TV. Potential low-friction onboards. And potential complaints from existing customers that upgraded to the new box if it didn't work.
- yaur 6y ago> This unnamed vendor was, in late 2017, preparing to launch a new device running Android 5.0 which was EoL and had not seen an update since late 2015 The issue is that in order to get a license for real Android your devices has to meet some minimum specs so if you want to create an inexpensive device that doesn't meet those specs AOSP is still a reasonable choice for your OS. I'm not sure if its still true, but it used to be that if you were shipping any AOSP based device Google wouldn't give you an Android license for any of your other devices so manufacturers that were interested in serving more price sensitive markets (e.g. India) will sometimes use it across their whole product line.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoOkay, but why not a newer AOSP?
- izacus 6y agoFrom 1st hand experience: Because your board (that is hardware/soc) vendor only gives you a BSP for Android and they want to charge 500k for an update. The binaries are of course all blobs and the kernel is a precompiled binary monstrosity. Your company doesn't see the reason to pay for newer version because older "works fine".