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The thing for me is that the media companies that thought they could just launch their own streaming services and keep all the money for themselves completely d
by poink 3y ago
The thing for me is that the media companies that thought they could just launch their own streaming services and keep all the money for themselves completely devalued the engineering of Netflix. It was "FAANG" for a reason. Viscerally, Netflix doesn't feel like it belongs alongside Google, but it did, because it was good.
How does Disney fail to make money off Star Wars? Because they decided to build a shitty tech company in-house instead of just doing what they know and licensing their content to the experts.
They had to have it all, and they played themselves.
- evilfred 3y agothis is factually incorrect. Disney bought a very successful sports streamer BAMTech to power Disney+
- poink 3y agoOh, Jesus! BAMTech! How could I have forgotten a member of the vaunted FAANGB
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- schneems 3y agoCan you tell me how that changes the story for you?
- evilfred 3y agoit discounts the entire parent post. BAMTech wasn't a shitty in-house development, it was a billion dollar buyout of the widely acclaimed MLB streamer.
- jrockway 3y agoDisney is also a huge tech company, and has been one for a while. They didn't buy a system for managing theme parks off the shelf.
- poink 3y agoDisney is a huge tech company in the same way Lockheed Martin is a huge tech company.
- gausswho 3y agoDIG or Disney Internet Group circa the early naughts was legit talented and influentially working in technology. Then the pyramid of management death arrived. Protip and disclaimer: never work for Disney as a contractor. They'll blame you for their own faults and bring the lawyers out on you for shiggles.
- donavanm 3y agohuge +1. I havent worked in the encoding/delivery/CDN space for a few years but BAM was great. They aren't "pulling an HBO" as far as I can tell; they skipped the painful build your own platform from scratch learning experience. _Maybe_ Disney could have taken a different business approach with licensing. And arguably they took a bath on Disney+ costs initially. But I certainly wouldnt fault their technical implementation nor would I guess that content management/encoding/packaging/delivery is going to be a meaningful business problem for Disney+.
- nostromo 3y agoNetflix's tech is unremarkable now, though it was impressive 10 years ago. The tech difference from a user's perspective between HBO, Disney, Hulu, and Netflix today is nil.
- poink 3y agoNetflix has caching boxes at every major ISP and has been randomly knocking over their own services for several years to ensure they can recover without significant manual intervention. Even if the customer experience isn't that much better, their content delivery is almost certainly much cheaper per stream. Beyond that, you don't have to _rebuild Netflix_. Even if you do a good job, that's very expensive. It's folly to think you're going to make more money doing that than you will striking very favorable licensing terms with a fairly desperate tech company. Keep the "we could just build Disney+" in your back pocket as a threat.
- jrm4 3y agoGiven the existence of torrents, it really wasn't. Ever.
- number6 3y agoSome may claim that sonarr + jellyfin give them a better experience than the commercial service. Locally cached, all services combined, low fees for VPN. Password sharing with friends. There was a time when this was to much hazel to set up compared with a Netflix subscription.
- jrmg 3y agoI can’t square your comment with the fact that my experience of the other big name streaming services has been just as good as my experience with Netflix. They basically all just work almost all the time. If Netflix has more valuable technical excellence it should show in the customer experience of the product.
- empath75 3y agoHBO's app is a dumpster fire, but disney+ is quite nice.
- charlie0 3y agoThe recent Max UI revamp was awful and completely unnecessary. It looks worse and I personally find it harder to find what I'm looking for.
- epups 3y agoI disagree. Amazon Prime has an obnoxious UI, HBO until recently at least was even worse. Those other providers feel like these airplane interfaces for media, there is some flimsiness to it.
- wink 3y agoyeah, from the ones I a have used (Netflix, Disney+, Prime, Maxdome) only Prime is atrocious, all others are not perfect but usable.
- Semaphor 3y agoI found Netflix to be getting worse and worse till I finally cancelled 1-2 years ago. The interface was doing weird stuff, more and more autoplay, weird suggestions, search results turning to shit. They were working towards being as bad as prime, but prime was "free" if you subscribed to at least one twitch channel, and Netflix kept raising prices.
- 3y ago
- dv_dt 3y agoNot really sure what is so bad about the delivery of Disney+, if anything it’s categorizations are cleaner and simpler (perhaps in part because they have less content). The ui is imho less annoying then Netflix. But I have both services and in the end there’s really not much difference in how well they stream.
- dayjaby 3y agoSo now we start complaining about competition and not care about monopolies at all? You seriously want all the power given to Netflix?
- xctr94 3y agoAs a Star Wars fan, Disney’s failure on this topic isn’t technical at all. The content is just mediocre; it doesn’t excite or motivate one to watch, it feels bland and commercial. What they’re doing to other franchises — and notably Pixar’s work — is quite similar.
- Melchizedek 3y agoExcept for Andor, which is fantastic.
- downWidOutaFite 3y agoContent is king. The tech barely matters. Especially since they made recommendations be subservient to marketing.
- eadmund 3y ago> How does Disney fail to make money off Star Wars? Because they decided to build a shitty tech company in-house instead of just doing what they know and licensing their content to the experts. They may or may not have tech issues. Their issues with Star Wars are far larger than anything having to do with tech, starting from the fact that apparently no-one associated with Star Wars in over a decade appears to like, understand or even be more than superficially familiar with Star Wars. In the particular case of Rian Johnson, if one only examined The Last Jedi it would not be clear that he is even superficially familiar with cinema, film, science fiction, space opera or simple storytelling. The Force Awakens may have been bad fan fiction, but TLJ was something I’ve never seen before: hate fiction. Actually, maybe ‘hate’ is too strong a word: perhaps TLJ is evidence of a creative team who doesn’t appear to hate Star Wars so much as resent it. They appear to have resented it for existing, for being successful, for being a world they had to tell their stories in. But it’s resentment tinged with something verging into hatred. I honestly believe that for generations to come Disney’s squandering of the Star Wars franchise will be taught in schools alongside the New Coke fiasco. It’s remarkable: while success would not necessarily have been easy, Disney could have churned out low-effort dreck like TFA for years. It would have been bad, but folks would have eaten it up.
- anon84873628 3y agoMy assumption was that Disney makes content for children, and children don't have the same quality standard as adults. The story only needs to be good enough so adults are willing to sit through it on repeat every day for a year. For Disney, Star Wars exists to sell Lego sets and trips to the theme park.