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I think 99% of the "hard stuff" at Netflix is serving the video. The rest of the apps are mainly display and a little bit of crud. It's so easy for them to co
by eric4smith 5y ago
I think 99% of the "hard stuff" at Netflix is serving the video.
The rest of the apps are mainly display and a little bit of crud.
It's so easy for them to continue to experiment with the front end all the time -- because it's "not that hard" (tm).
But the video serving? Rendering? Streaming in different resolutions? The video player? CDN's? Damn, that sh*t rough brah.
- toast0 5y ago> I think 99% of the "hard stuff" at Netflix is serving the video. The hard stuff is licensing content, IMHO. The technical bits aren't easy, but they're mostly straight-forward stuff that small teams can work on and make incremental progress towards. Having an existing large base of revenue and users and having a clear focus enabled Netflix to get licenses and make a good experience, and continually improve it (although, I have some nits to pick, of course). Other companies have streaming services of course, but none of them have the organizational focus to make things work as well, IMHO.
- haolez 5y agoCRUD stuff can be complicated at Netflix-scale.
- atatatat 5y agoJust the translations of such an app would drive me batty.
- onion2k 5y agoI think 99% of the "hard stuff" at Netflix is serving the video. Making a robust, consistent, fast user experience that works well across all devices, resolutions, and network conditions is quite hard. If it was easy then fewer websites would suck.
- yosamino 5y agoI am curious - I'm just doing a somewhat naive implementation for a private project. Do you have any pointers to a writeup of some specific problems I might not have encountered yet ?
- blamarvt 5y agoHonestly the official Netflix site seems to perform similarly to your implementation in terms of number of files it downloads and the size of files. One thing I found was when emulating mobile screen size I wasn't able to horizontally scroll with my track pad. It works on Netflix though. I'm betting you'll find 100+ of those 'small' things with user testing across different OS/browser combinations.
- yosamino 5y agoI'm just implementing this on a very tiny level. Just one video that will maybe get a view every other day or so. I do have adaptive streaming and something that qualifies as "CDN" only if you squint. But it's not harder than most other IT niches one might get into. I am not saying it's without challenges - I pulled plenty of hair. Just that it's doable and that all the parts one might need are available for me to built into a usable system. Scaling that up will might be hard in the sense that it's a lot more expensive, but the core technology is there.
- eric4smith 5y agoOh I was not critiquing your effort at all. In fact, good job. It was actually amazing.
- yosamino 5y agoI am realizing now that what I wrote reads like I was the author of Fakeflix - I am not. Sorry for the confusion..
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- city41 5y agoDisclaimer, I worked at Netflix for 5 years. There are some interesting challenges in the clients. The TV client needs to run on devices with very little memory, and processors roughly as powerful as a Pentium 2. The JavaScript must be interpreted too, no JITing allowed. Getting smooth experiences everywhere in the world where internet quality and device power varies drastically, all in one code base that about 100 people work on, is a pretty good challenge. For example an entire proprietary "browser" was created with the goal of being low memory and high performance. So for TV devices, the entire dev stack from top to bottom had to be created mostly from scratch. This included forking React to create a version that would run on this platform. It's also interesting on the other end, what cool stuff can be done on the PS5 for example? Shaders and animation techniques are also pretty interesting to explore.
- emilfihlman 5y agoNetflix is regularly slow or laggy with its ui even on perfectly normal hardware so you kind of failed with your task.
- gmadsen 5y agothats pretty rude to be honest. Netflix has done a better job than anyone else at creating a video platform
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- herbst 5y agoDRM! Reading the headline I thought someone found an open way to ship videos in a copyright friendly way
- alias_neo 5y agoIf the UX isn't the hard stuff, I hold no hope for anyone else. I'm yet to experience a media streaming product that can hold a candle to Netflix in terms of UX on any platform. On my 2017 (non-Android) 4K "Smart" TV, the Netflix app is light years beyond everything else for UX, performance, everything, there's just no competition.
- jmkni 5y agoI think BBC iPlayer is as good in terms of UX
- nonameiguess 5y agoNo disrespect meant to their engineering team, because I actually think Netflix does a much better job and produces less buggy software than any other streaming app, but the hard part is acquiring and/or creating a catalog worth subscribing to. The quality of the user experience is overwhelmingly determined by the quality of what they're watching. This is the basic reason why, though I'm sure they pay the engineers "well," they're not getting the $500 million deals the high profile writers and directors are getting.