12 ms·

I think a fair criticism would be how many engineers they have compared to their competitors. Disney+ is on a similar scale, can they do the same/similar job wi

by Sytten 4y ago

I think a fair criticism would be how many engineers they have compared to their competitors. Disney+ is on a similar scale, can they do the same/similar job with less people? And considering netflix pays top of market, how much does Disney spends for their engineering effort to get their result. Would netflix benefit from just throwing more hardware at the problem vs paying more engineers 400-500k/y to optimize?

entropie 4y ago
I wasn't able to watch disney+ via chromecast for like a year in 4k. Stuttering every 10 seconds or so. I never had problems like this with netflix.
- criddell 4y ago
  I guess you weren't a Comcast customer in 2014 trying to watch Netflix and getting low quality, stuttering video. At the time lots of people tried to frame it as a net neutrality issue but in the end I think it was a peering dispute that involved a third party. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304834704579401071892041790 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304834704579401...
  - loopercal 4y ago
    I think this just validates their points. Netflix has more engineers and 8 years of them building and fixing things, so they have fewer issues.
paxys 4y ago
Disney (the company) has 20x the number of employees as Netflix, and just 2x the market cap (in fact they were briefly worth the same last year), ~2x the revenue and 2/5 the net income. So Netflix is clearly doing something right.
- ziddoap 4y ago
  >Disney (the company) has 20x the number of employees Is that all of Disney or just Disney+? It doesn't seem like that would be a useful statistic if that includes completely unrelated positions (e.g. does that 20x statistic include Disney employees working at Disney Land/World serving up hotdogs? Because they probably don't contribute much to the streaming service)
  - briffle 4y ago
    Netflix also has production studios they now own making content.
    - thfuran 4y ago
      Content like hotdogs at an amusement park?
      - diab0lic 4y ago
        https://bridgertonexperience.com/san-francisco/ https://bridgertonexperience.com/san-francisco/ https://strangerthings-experience.com/ https://strangerthings-experience.com/
- scrlk 4y ago
  Disney Streaming had 850 employees as of 2017 [0] (can't find any newer figures); LinkedIn is suggesting 1k-5k. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Streaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Streaming
- eru 4y ago
  Perhaps they are just running different business models? Walmart's market cap per employee is probably much, much lower than Disney or Netflix, too. That doesn't mean Walmart is doing anything wrong.
rybosworld 4y ago
That seems like a fair point if you just consider the video streaming. I know that Netflix wants to break into gaming. I'd imagine the bandwidth required for that is higher than streaming videos.
- jon-wood 4y ago
  It's really not, especially if you look at their current model for doing so. Netflix at the moment are breaking into mobile gaming, which means the bandwidth requirements are placed on Apple/Google's app store infrastructure. I'd be surprised if Netflix don't have any sort of metrics gathering infrastructure to judge how much people are playing those games, but they're also likely reusing the same infrastructure used by Netflix video streaming for that, so the incremental increase in load may well be negligible.
  - rybosworld 4y ago
    I was referring to their plans for a game streaming service.
iamricks 4y ago
Standing on the shoulders of giants, Netflix engineers didn't have blog posts from other companies on how to handle the scale they started facing. Facebook didn't have blog posts to reference when they scaled to 1B users. They pay for talent that have built systems that had not been built before and they have seen a return on it so they continue to do it.
- wowokay 4y ago
  Hulu was around before netflix
  - msh 4y ago
    Hulu was never Netflix scale. YouTube is a better example.
    - birdyrooster 4y ago
      Not even close. YouTube has orders of magnitude more content and vastly more users. Google Global Cache was the inspiration for Open Connect.
    - jedberg 4y ago
      Youtube is very different than Netflix from a technical problem perspective. They serve free videos to anyone around the world that are uploaded by users. It's closer to a live streaming problem than pre-encoded video like Netflix. Having worked at Netflix I can say that the YouTube problem is much more complex.
      - why_only_15 4y ago
        I wonder what portion of Youtube's request traffic can be served with cache servers at the edge with a few hundred terabytes of storage. There's a very long tail but i would guess a significant portion of their traffic is the top ~10,000 videos at any given moment.
        4y ago
jwmoz 4y ago
I watch Disney content sometimes and it constantly drops or freezes, you can see the difference in quality compared to Netflix.
- nicce 4y ago
  You can’t make such conclusions from your own experience. It is one form of bias. There are many variables. For me it is the opposite, for example.
- bmurphy1976 4y ago
  Yeah, you can totally see the difference. Netflix encoding looks like shit. I've done a lot of video processing professionally (the server side stuff, exactly what Netflix does) and Netflix is by far the worst of all the streaming providers. They absolutely sacrifice the quality of the video to save bandwidth costs in aggregate and it shows (or more accurately it doesn't show, all the fidelity is lost).
  - bmurphy1976 4y ago
    For anybody looking at this after-the-fact, I'm not making it up. Netflix really does look like shit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32553958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32553958
  - mkmk 4y ago
    Do you think it's worth it to pay the extra $5-10/month for premium quality? https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926
    - bradstewart 4y ago
      Even the Premium 4k streams have surprisingly low bitrates and, occasionally, framerates. I dug out the blu-ray player the other day and was absolutely shocked how good things looked and, even more so, sounded--the audio quality from Netflix (and most streaming services, really) is simply atrocious.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
The engineers are definitely cost-effective at this scale. They may be the highest-leverage engineers at the company in terms of $ earned from their efforts compared to $ spent. The improvements that come from performance engineers at large companies are frequently worth $10M/year/person or more. Most companies maintain internal calculations of these sorts of things, and make rational decisions.
- gregsadetsky 4y ago
  Sorry for the tangent, but really curious to ask: When you say that companies maintain internal calculations of the benefits, would you say that it’s (extremely roughly) something like: $10M benefit, need 5 core engineers + benefits + PM + testing lab etc etc -> we can spend up to $500k per eng give or take. Or is the $10M one number (that would be held somewhat secretly internally at the company) and the salaries mostly represents where the market is? Does the (salary) market take into account the down-the-line $10M value? Basically, could those engs negotiate to be paid more, or are they already sort of paid close to exactly what the group they’re part of generates in terms of revenue? Thanks! — I see that you said $10M per person, not for the “network optimization group”. Hmm. So it would be fair to say that the engs are definitely not paid according to the value they generate..? I wouldn’t be surprised by that but just to confirm.
  - Hermitian909 4y ago
    Not OP, but 1 engineer -> 10M of benefit sounds right for my company. In terms of negotiation, it really depends on how differentiated your skills are. Short answer is that if you can convince management that it would be difficult to find other engineers who could deliver the optimizations you're delivering, yes, you have leverage.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      This is exactly right about negotiation and your skillset. I have seen performance engineers in the right place at the right time get 10-20% of their benefit to the company (I have seen both $1 million/year compensation for line workers and $10+ million/year for very senior folks). Very highly skilled engineers in specific niches can basically price themselves like monopolists, because the company can easily figure out how much money they are leaving on the table by not hiring them. This is not like "feature work" engineers, whose value is very nebulous and unknown.
toast0 4y ago
> Would netflix benefit from just throwing more hardware at the problem vs paying more engineers 400-500k/y to optimize? Where the CDN boxes go, you can't always just throw more hardware. There's a limited amount of space, it's not controlled by Netflix, and other people want to throw hardware into that same space. Pushing 800gbps in the same amount of space that others do 80gbps (or less) is a big deal.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
slillibri 4y ago
Disney bought a majority ownership in BAMTECH to build Disney+.

by Sytten 4y ago

entropie 4y ago

I wasn't able to watch disney+ via chromecast for like a year in 4k. Stuttering every 10 seconds or so. I never had problems like this with netflix.

criddell 4y ago
I guess you weren't a Comcast customer in 2014 trying to watch Netflix and getting low quality, stuttering video. At the time lots of people tried to frame it as a net neutrality issue but in the end I think it was a peering dispute that involved a third party. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304834704579401071892041790 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304834704579401...
- loopercal 4y ago
  I think this just validates their points. Netflix has more engineers and 8 years of them building and fixing things, so they have fewer issues.

paxys 4y ago

Disney (the company) has 20x the number of employees as Netflix, and just 2x the market cap (in fact they were briefly worth the same last year), ~2x the revenue and 2/5 the net income. So Netflix is clearly doing something right.

ziddoap 4y ago
>Disney (the company) has 20x the number of employees Is that all of Disney or just Disney+? It doesn't seem like that would be a useful statistic if that includes completely unrelated positions (e.g. does that 20x statistic include Disney employees working at Disney Land/World serving up hotdogs? Because they probably don't contribute much to the streaming service)
- briffle 4y ago
  Netflix also has production studios they now own making content.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    Content like hotdogs at an amusement park?
    - diab0lic 4y ago
      https://bridgertonexperience.com/san-francisco/ https://bridgertonexperience.com/san-francisco/ https://strangerthings-experience.com/ https://strangerthings-experience.com/
scrlk 4y ago
Disney Streaming had 850 employees as of 2017 [0] (can't find any newer figures); LinkedIn is suggesting 1k-5k. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Streaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Streaming
eru 4y ago
Perhaps they are just running different business models? Walmart's market cap per employee is probably much, much lower than Disney or Netflix, too. That doesn't mean Walmart is doing anything wrong.

rybosworld 4y ago

That seems like a fair point if you just consider the video streaming. I know that Netflix wants to break into gaming. I'd imagine the bandwidth required for that is higher than streaming videos.

jon-wood 4y ago
It's really not, especially if you look at their current model for doing so. Netflix at the moment are breaking into mobile gaming, which means the bandwidth requirements are placed on Apple/Google's app store infrastructure. I'd be surprised if Netflix don't have any sort of metrics gathering infrastructure to judge how much people are playing those games, but they're also likely reusing the same infrastructure used by Netflix video streaming for that, so the incremental increase in load may well be negligible.
- rybosworld 4y ago
  I was referring to their plans for a game streaming service.

iamricks 4y ago

Standing on the shoulders of giants, Netflix engineers didn't have blog posts from other companies on how to handle the scale they started facing. Facebook didn't have blog posts to reference when they scaled to 1B users. They pay for talent that have built systems that had not been built before and they have seen a return on it so they continue to do it.

wowokay 4y ago
Hulu was around before netflix
- msh 4y ago
  Hulu was never Netflix scale. YouTube is a better example.
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    Not even close. YouTube has orders of magnitude more content and vastly more users. Google Global Cache was the inspiration for Open Connect.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    Youtube is very different than Netflix from a technical problem perspective. They serve free videos to anyone around the world that are uploaded by users. It's closer to a live streaming problem than pre-encoded video like Netflix. Having worked at Netflix I can say that the YouTube problem is much more complex.
    - why_only_15 4y ago
      I wonder what portion of Youtube's request traffic can be served with cache servers at the edge with a few hundred terabytes of storage. There's a very long tail but i would guess a significant portion of their traffic is the top ~10,000 videos at any given moment.
      - 4y ago

jwmoz 4y ago

I watch Disney content sometimes and it constantly drops or freezes, you can see the difference in quality compared to Netflix.

nicce 4y ago
You can’t make such conclusions from your own experience. It is one form of bias. There are many variables. For me it is the opposite, for example.
bmurphy1976 4y ago
Yeah, you can totally see the difference. Netflix encoding looks like shit. I've done a lot of video processing professionally (the server side stuff, exactly what Netflix does) and Netflix is by far the worst of all the streaming providers. They absolutely sacrifice the quality of the video to save bandwidth costs in aggregate and it shows (or more accurately it doesn't show, all the fidelity is lost).
- bmurphy1976 4y ago
  For anybody looking at this after-the-fact, I'm not making it up. Netflix really does look like shit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32553958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32553958
- mkmk 4y ago
  Do you think it's worth it to pay the extra $5-10/month for premium quality? https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926
  - bradstewart 4y ago
    Even the Premium 4k streams have surprisingly low bitrates and, occasionally, framerates. I dug out the blu-ray player the other day and was absolutely shocked how good things looked and, even more so, sounded--the audio quality from Netflix (and most streaming services, really) is simply atrocious.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

The engineers are definitely cost-effective at this scale. They may be the highest-leverage engineers at the company in terms of $ earned from their efforts compared to $ spent. The improvements that come from performance engineers at large companies are frequently worth $10M/year/person or more. Most companies maintain internal calculations of these sorts of things, and make rational decisions.

gregsadetsky 4y ago
Sorry for the tangent, but really curious to ask: When you say that companies maintain internal calculations of the benefits, would you say that it’s (extremely roughly) something like: $10M benefit, need 5 core engineers + benefits + PM + testing lab etc etc -> we can spend up to $500k per eng give or take. Or is the $10M one number (that would be held somewhat secretly internally at the company) and the salaries mostly represents where the market is? Does the (salary) market take into account the down-the-line $10M value? Basically, could those engs negotiate to be paid more, or are they already sort of paid close to exactly what the group they’re part of generates in terms of revenue? Thanks! — I see that you said $10M per person, not for the “network optimization group”. Hmm. So it would be fair to say that the engs are definitely not paid according to the value they generate..? I wouldn’t be surprised by that but just to confirm.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  Not OP, but 1 engineer -> 10M of benefit sounds right for my company. In terms of negotiation, it really depends on how differentiated your skills are. Short answer is that if you can convince management that it would be difficult to find other engineers who could deliver the optimizations you're delivering, yes, you have leverage.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    This is exactly right about negotiation and your skillset. I have seen performance engineers in the right place at the right time get 10-20% of their benefit to the company (I have seen both $1 million/year compensation for line workers and $10+ million/year for very senior folks). Very highly skilled engineers in specific niches can basically price themselves like monopolists, because the company can easily figure out how much money they are leaving on the table by not hiring them. This is not like "feature work" engineers, whose value is very nebulous and unknown.

toast0 4y ago

> Would netflix benefit from just throwing more hardware at the problem vs paying more engineers 400-500k/y to optimize? Where the CDN boxes go, you can't always just throw more hardware. There's a limited amount of space, it's not controlled by Netflix, and other people want to throw hardware into that same space. Pushing 800gbps in the same amount of space that others do 80gbps (or less) is a big deal.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

slillibri 4y ago

Disney bought a majority ownership in BAMTECH to build Disney+.