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Here's the framework I use: "tech companies" are those where tech still plays a significant factor in the growth of the company such that it's important to an e

• websap 5y ago
  > serving several thousand VODs and that problem is solved You're kidding right? You think this problem is solved? Try using HBO. A tech company is any company that understands it can leverage technology effectively to run a more efficient organization. They treat tech as the way to solve problems rather than throwing people at the problem.
  • tapoxi 5y ago
    Could you clarify? I subscribe to HBO Max and it works fine.
    • cletus 5y ago
      I wonder if that commenter meant HBO Go? HBO tech has had an interesting history. First came HBO Go. This was the online streaming for those with HBO as part of a standard cable package. Apparently it was built on a .Net stack and had huge problems. HBO Now is the service created for standalone sales of streaming. Apparently it had a completely different tech stack because of issues with HBO Go. Apparently it came from the same people who did the streaming services for MLB (Major League Baseball)> In my experience it was very good. HBO Max is the expanded and updated content ecosystem that came with the merger. I don't know what the tech stack here is. I suspect it's just incremental changes to HBO Now but that's just a guess. Perhaps the commenter was referring to HBO Go's problems as evidence that serving VODs isn't "solved". To clarify, I mean "solved for Netflix".
      • jen20 5y ago
        The UI of HBO Max on an Apple TV is entirely befitting of AT&T - it makes me want to watch anything else because of how bad scrolling is because they insist on using their own crapware instead of the platform-native software.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • kristjansson 5y ago
          Chalk up DirectTV NOW/ATT TV/DirectTV Stream (all the same product) as a victim of that too. Scroll interactions take multiple seconds to register, click activates elements other than the one indicated as selected by the UI, just an overall shitshow. But they’re the only OTT streamer that carries the Lakers and Dodgers channels, so alas…
          • bradknowles 5y ago
            Oh, if only I could outright kill all sports channels and sports content. Or at least permanently hide all sports-related content on all devices I own. I pay for the Hulu+/Disney+ combo that does not include ESPN, because I don’t want to pay for ESPN. Even if that triple combo was cheaper, I’d still pay for the combo that doesn’t include ESPN.
        • mikeryan 5y ago
          Warner Bros and therefore HBO Max bought a company called You.i that built their own React Native Rendering engine for low end OTT devices I don't know if they use that engine for mobile or the native RN engines. Last I heard their whole ecosystem is now based on this. But if there's scrolling issues and some others, its likely because they're literally trying to run one codebase across everything including OTT devices. https://www.youi.tv/ https://www.youi.tv/
      • mulmen 5y ago
        This is the marketing equivalent of a leaky abstraction.
    • websap 5y ago
      HBO Max, continuous crashes, recommendation algorithm, massive latency even above the fold, I've learned the failure modes and I know how to fix this. This in on a modern Roku TV, released 8 months ago. 0 problems like this from Netflix.
  • flerchin 5y ago
    You're kidding right? Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Instant Video, CBS All-Access, whatever, they all do basically the same thing, and the only differentiator for my parents is the content.
    • tomrod 5y ago
      And UI and price.
    • burntoutfire 5y ago
      And bugs. Haven't encountered any in Netflix yet, while HBO Go's are annoying.
  • bumby 5y ago
    >any company that understands it can leverage technology effectively to run a more efficient organization. This feels like too broad of a generalization to be a useful definition. I could make the case any hospital or logistics or <insert business here> is a tech company by this. Tech seems too ubiquitous for this to be an effective definition. I haven't given it much thought, but maybe "a company with a business moat hinging mostly on its unique technology or ability to use technology" would be a better definition. E.g., Walmart could still be a (less) successful business without an online presence but Amazon couldn't.
  • jerf 5y ago
    It's solved by Netflix. Doesn't mean it's solved by anyone else, though there are also quite a few other companies that have it "solved" for their level of usage, even if they couldn't flip the switch tomorrow to become Netflix. "Solved" also doesn't mean there aren't people maintaining it or working on it or getting woken up at night by pages to keep it going. It just means, they've got a handle on it and when the Netflix executive team meets to discuss the business, they aren't spending much time discussing the question of whether or not they can stream video to their customers.
    • cletus 5y ago
      Exactly this. It doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. Others have pointed to UI issues, for example. It just means the state of the tech probably isn't the top of mind for the C-team and the board.
      • websap 5y ago
        Nope, there are 2 parts of this problem: 1. What do customers perceive. 2. What does it cost to run this software for Netflix - Companies are continuously trying to improve this while maintaining or improving 1. Being done, is not what a tech company ever thinks of. Look at all the innovation coming out of Netflix as OSS products and blog posts.
• coding123 5y ago
  If it's solved, why is the UI for any other content streamer as seamless on my roku as the Netflix one. All the others, I might as well be using a 13 channel rotary dial still. Even Prime sucks, just try rewinding or fast forwarding a minute and see how frustrating that is.
  • ativzzz 5y ago
    The problem is, for consumers, these minor technical issues don't matter as much as the content on the platforms. Yes, Netflix works much more smoothly than HBO, but we don't choose Netflix over HBO because of the quality of the video streaming app, but for the shows we actually want to watch.
    • ariwilson 5y ago
      I don't think this is true; I definitely choose YouTube / Netflix over e.g. Amazon Prime just to browse for new shows as the UI/recommendations are way better. This affects my watch time significantly.
      • sokoloff 5y ago
        100% agree. I’m watching these over 99% of time on an Amazon FireTV device and YouTube and Netflix both have a better UI/UX than Prime video. It’s not even close. FireTV device is an excellent value. Prime video? Well, it’s free with Prime at least…
    • ssully 5y ago
      I understand this is an anecdote, but out of the apps I use, I probably go to Netflix or HBO first, then Hulu, and Amazon Video last. I honestly try to avoid Amazon's video app as much as possible because of how poor the navigation and discoverability is.
      • wheelinsupial 5y ago
        I try to avoid Amazon Prime Video because of the practices they use. It’s basically becoming a cable service now. Ads before the video plays, content locked up behind additional pay channels, which have the TV ads play during the content, and getting teasers of the first season of first few episodes only to find out the rest of the series is on a pay channel.
• duped 5y ago
  There are numerous "unsolved" problems in VoD - technical, economic, and creative. Netflix and YouTube barely scratch the surface, and traditional multimedia organizations give up and ship what they can on other companies' infrastructure without any technical innovation. XR and interactive content are the obvious next generation of platform with many technical challenges to overcome. It's hardly solved.
  • kbenson 5y ago
    It's solved to the level that additional changes and advancements won't make a major difference to the company as it is right now. Those advancements might end up being a major component later, but someone else could solve that problem and they could license it just about as easily. At this point Netflix is a multimedia company that runs their own infrastructure, not a tech company focused on delivering multimedia. Netflix could swap out all the underlying tech for someone else's and update their players to use that and nobody would really notice, except possibly for the very few interactive experiences they run. That's why they're not a tech company anymore, they've matured the technology, and so have their competitors, to the point it's a commodity.
• tomrod 5y ago
  Tech firm: your product team creates externally used technologies. Not tech: tech improvements are internal and/or your IT staff is all about maintaining/integrating external products. IT as cost center versus profit center may be a useful distinction.
  • maerF0x0 5y ago
    but even if the center is profit, is the focus weighted on the technology it uses or just accomplishing the task (and time to market because any median engineer can accomplish this)?
  • robertlagrant 5y ago
    > IT as cost center versus profit center may be a useful distinction. Or perhaps "has a software engineering department".
• nine_k 5y ago
  I would hazard to say that a sufficient (not a necessary) condition for a company to be a "tech company" is its tech being hard to replicate, that is, far from a commodity. Google is a tech company because both the search and the ads networks are hard at the planet scale; we can see how hard it is to compete. Same applies to e.g. Twitter or Uber. It applies much less to, say, Reddit, or eBay, or Craiglist; their tech is secondary to their existing network effects. A company like GrubHub definitely has a strong tech branch, but the tech is secondary to its delivery network and restaurant contracts. A company like CNN, equally, must have a strong engineering / IT branch, but it's so secondary it feels totally invisible, and everyone sees them as a "media company", not a "tech company".
• spoonjim 5y ago
  There is probably still a lot more AI/ML work to do at Netflix. For example if you are browsing through standup comedy specials and you see the trailer joke, and you skip to the next one, they know exactly where in the joke that comedian bombed for you. So for other people like you, they can show a different joke from their special, and for you they can build a profile of the kind of humor you like. Then if you start a video and stop it, they can know that the joke they showed as a trailer was not representative of the first impression the comedian gives in the special. etc.
  • mulmen 5y ago
    It’s an open question if this kind of capability actually has a positive impact on the bottom line.
    • cletus 5y ago
      Honestly that's my experience with ML in general. And I know any organization that does a lot of ML has things like backtests and holdouts to supposedly measure impact on key metrics but I've seen too many cases where adding X has a +10% impact in some top line metric and then removing it later (and returning to the initial state) has another 5% increase in that same top line metric. Maybe we need to revise the famous phrase to: Lies, damned lies, statistics and machine learning.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • spoonjim 5y ago
      They must know whether people encouraged to watch more Netflix actually retain Netflix at higher rates. As their prices have gone up I assume this is becoming a bigger and bigger issue.
      • mulmen 5y ago
        How does your ML model control for opportunity cost? How do you prove a causation between watch rate and retention? Do algorithms that encourage viewership actually increase revenue, or retention? What happens when the algorithm is so good I under-sleep, miss work and get fired, eventually losing my ability to pay for Netflix? What if I see this in myself and cancel my subscription, instead of using Netflix sustainably? What happens if I genuinely watch all programming I find interesting and move on to reading books on the same topics? In other words, if the Netflix catalog is perfectly sorted by relevance to my personal interests, how much of it will I engage with? How far can Netflix content creators and licensors follow me down the rabbit hole?
• maerF0x0 5y ago
  > Netflix isn't a tech company anymore They're still solving some interesting problems like how to watch the same content, in sync, with your friends. Interestingly my gf and I noticed that when we watched NFLX together using a video call to see eachother's faces/commentary our video would skew by noticeable amounts across the span of a movie. (eg even a 0.5% speed difference would give a 3 second skew in 10 minutes, which is enough for one to see someone's reaction to a surprising part of the video differ from your own. So there are still technical fringes to solve that can value differentiate from late adopters like the channel specific providers like say the ABC app https://abc.com/apps https://abc.com/apps
  • cletus 5y ago
    Co-watching is an interesting space. One I've worked in actually. And yes, I agree it's not "solved". Amazon has taken a stab at this with a watch party on Twitch. I imagine you could have a private stream and do it that way maybe? Not ideal of course. It's intended for a different use case. The best options I've seen involve using sites of questionable legality plus Discord. Your observations of skew are kind of interesting and larger than I would've expected. But I guess this is the video players being built to show you the content not showing you the content at the same time as someone else. Specifically this means no effort is made to "catch up" in case of buffering. You or your GF must have a lot of buffering. This alone surprises me because Netflix's core delivery tech seems to be extremely good. But again, their delivery tech probably isn't built to solve this problem. Anyway, while that's an unsolved problem it's not core to Netflix's business and that's the key criteria here.
    • maerF0x0 5y ago
      On different hardware how do they synchronize the playback speed? Each device has very different processing environment, so I cant imagine it would be easy to ensure that exact of playback speed. eg maybe one is playing 30 frames per second, and the other is playing 29.85 ...
      • snovv_crash 5y ago
• BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  > search continues to get better Many here would dispute this claim. However, it may be that SEO spam has caught up and we're merely at the old equilibrium rather than worse than before the peak of Google usefulness.
  • AStrangeMorrow 5y ago
    This might be very anecdotal, but in my case, outside of tech/programming topics, I feel like google results are getting more and more generic. For example, a while back I had some changes in my life and had to fill lots of paperwork. I had various administrative issues regarding 2/3 specific forms. When I searched for people that ran into these issues, I found many helpful link/forums etc... Fast forward these past few months, had to fill the same forms and ran into some of the same issues. But now and all I am finding is stuff like links to the forms, links to the administration websites, links to how to fill the form and so on. Maybe it is a SEO issue, but overall I feel like I am struggling more and more to get useful search results to very specific questions. But then again, sample size of 1.
    • cletus 5y ago
      Search is one of those areas where I find people have very strong but very subjective opinions for some reason. It's like every DDG related HN thread always has these comments: - I moved to DDG X years ago and it's [fine|better than Google] - I can't find anything on Google anymore - Here's a search where I didn't find what I want. It's reached the point that I just immediately tune out whenever someone brings up anecdotes. There just seems to be so much confirmation bias. I mean no disrespect here. This is generally true. Anecdotes just don't mean anything but for some people tech people love them when it comes to search.
      • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
        I think this is one of those areas where aggregate statistics do not line up with the personal experiences of a majority of the population to such a degree that they are tossed out as unreliable. See also: the stunning ineffectiveness of saying "but the unemployment rate is only 3%". For that matter, is there any more objective data about the quality of search results over time or are anecdotes all we currently have?
• majormajor 5y ago
  One core problem Netflix is currently trying to solve with tech is "how do we produce hundreds of series/movies concurrently with predictable budgets and predictable performance." They want to be a tech and data-driven studio.
  • fullshark 5y ago
    Doesn't every large mature company basically try to solve this problem, namely predictable revenues and expenses?
    • bradknowles 5y ago
      They need predictable revenue GROWTH, not just predictable revenue. Because if you’re not growing, then you’re dead. And no one wants to be dead. This is the fallacy that all big companies seem to fall into, because they try to keep chasing the kind of growth numbers they had when they were small, but of course they can’t possibly sustain that level of growth.
• lliamander 5y ago
  I distinguish between tech companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Intel, and tech-enabled companies like Netflix, Amazon (the store part, at least) Facebook. The former actually sells technology (hardware or software) whereas the latter uses technology as a strategic tool in selling something else.
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Yes, which make Google an advertising company.
    • lliamander 5y ago
      Yes, I agree, though I think Google presents an interesting case study because technology develop preceded it's business model. It at least started out as a tech company. But while it has also expanded its business model to include selling actual tech (Google Cloud, Chromebooks and Pixel phones, etc.) the lion's share of its revenue comes from advertising.
• Rd6n6 5y ago
  > tech companies" are those where tech still plays a significant factor in the growth of the company such that it's important to an executive level. By similar definitions, aren’t almost all companies also money companies, employee companies, legal compliance companies, strategy companies, marketing companies, mission statement companies, fundraising companies, etc? That sort of definition works for giving job applicants a hint about whether the company might need them I guess.
  • nostrademons 5y ago
    By definition, "almost all" companies are not whatever departmental adjective comes next. In business, you're defined by your differentiators, the things that make you different from all other companies. Finance, HR, legal compliance, etc. are commodities: pretty much everyone knows how to do them. The companies that are defined by those labels (Goldman Sachs for finance, for example, or Gusto & ADP for payroll) are those that know how to do them so much better that other companies would rather pay them than do it themselves. So it is with tech. On some level all companies are tech companies in that you need a website, Intranet, database, etc. These are all commodities though. A "tech company" is one where your tech is so good that either you can offer differentiated consumer experiences that nobody else can offer (eg. YouTube, Apple, FB's various products, consumer parts of Google) or people pay you to handle the tech things for them (eg. AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud).
    • Rd6n6 5y ago
      > A "tech company" is one where your tech is so good that either you can offer differentiated consumer experiences that nobody else can offer(…) or people pay you to handle the tech things for them It’s a decent definition. It has some implications though Almost no companies really differentiate via tech that nobody else can offer Almost no game or app companies meet that bar. Most game companies have tech that another company can reproduce for example. Almost all apps use fairly commonplace tech.
      • kenhwang 5y ago
        Within gaming, there's Unity, Unreal, Crytek, and the like which I would classify as tech, but otherwise, most gaming companies are far more creative-focused much like film.
• alberth 5y ago
  Is Telsa then a "tech company" by your definition? What about Jet.com (pre-Walmart acquisition) that pioneered cheaper shipping / savings by informing users to by substitute products from the data distribution center.
  • cletus 5y ago
    Tesla is interesting because even they've described themselves as an energy company masquerading as a car company. Put another way: battery tech is Tesla's core business. They just happen to make cars as a way to sell batteries. It's a bit like how SpaceX is set to become a major player in regional Internet delivery but you wouldn't call SpaceX an Internet or a networking company. It's just a synergy between Internet as a business and reducing launch costs while proving reliability of first-stage reuse. I'm tempted to describe both companies as "engineering companies" more than "tech companies". I just looked at Tesla spends a relatively modest (for its size) ~$1.1B on R&D. So what's the difference? I'd say "tech" is largely about software and "engineering" is largely about hardware. Specifically, both Tesla and SpaceX are capital-intensive businesses where that capital is being used to produce physical products. To be clear, none of this is official in any way. This is just the framework for how I think about things.
    • alberth 5y ago
      Interesting take and I largely agree. I wonder how Boston Dynamics should be characterized.
    • adventured 5y ago
      > Put another way: battery tech is Tesla's core business. They just happen to make cars as a way to sell batteries. No it's not. That's a fake narrative that was invented by Tesla bulls to try to label Tesla as anything but an automaker. It doesn't make sense to categorize Tesla primarily as a battery company or energy company. Batteries and energy (including solar) are a fraction of their business in terms of dollar value and that will continue to be the case. That has been true for nearly two decades now. And it's not a close comparison, the battery is less than a quarter of the cost of the car. For the Model S and X it's far less than that. Tesla is an automobile company. GM and Ford are also not transitioning into being primarily battery companies. They're automakers. Want to test this out? Kindly ask Tesla to immediately end their automobile business and start only selling batteries, see what happens to the stock and their P&L statement. If in 20 years Tesla's battery business is finally larger than their automobile business, then sure, recategorize them.
• iratewizard 5y ago
  >search continues to get better. You lost me there. Even before Google started putting their thumb on the scale for its Machiavellian goals, search had gone way down hill. It is now at the point that I've got a better chance of finding something by randomly browsing the internet than through a dozen targeted searches. Unless what I'm looking for is associated with a multi billion dollar media company's content farm.
• grecy 5y ago
  > I once again return to the Steve Jobs take on why Xerox failed [1] Thanks, I had not seen that before. I worked for a telco that has the largest operating area of any telco in the world, and was also a monopoly with the highest internet prices in the world. Steve saying that product people (& Tech people) were not seen to improve the company, and that only sales and marketing did is absolutely spot on. I didn't see that at the time, and now in hindsight it's obvious. It also makes perfect sense why the former VP of Marketing is now the CEO (of a telco!), and not the VP of IT or Network.