11 ms·

The fragmentation is both a flaw and a feature. It means we have diversity in media vendors, at the cost of a pretty high cognitive load to just watch something

The fragmentation is both a flaw and a feature. It means we have diversity in media vendors, at the cost of a pretty high cognitive load to just watch something… which app is it on? What’s the account login? Search the device main search, then go to each app and do its own individual search. All while dodging ads and autoplay and “what’s new” and “for you.” It sucks for users. But it also sucks for developers, who have to maintain multiple apps for multiple platforms, even multiple generations per platform. And this affects users too, when a version of an app eventually gets dropped because the developer decides it’s too costly to maintain. The diversity and competition is good, but there’s got to be a better way. The AppleTV platform makes some effort to bridge the gaps, but apps have to play along, and many decide to roll their own instead of using the provided APIs, complaining about the APIs not letting them do what they want to do the way they want to do it. To which I say, getting all these apps to do something in a consistent way is the point. But whatever. I’m in no hurry to go back to huge cable bills. We told the industry to get on board with streaming if they don’t want piracy, and they did, so now here we are. Instead of digging through BitTorrent and newsgroups, we are juggling apps. ¯\_(°_o)_/¯

hakfoo 3y ago
The answer is mandatory licensing. Maybe permit some limited ability to offer a very narrow window of exclusivity (weeks, not years) in exchange for getting a lower rate later (because we should treat attempts to wall off parts of shared culture as a an antisocial act, rather than a nifty business model.) Every platform can have everything, at a predictable standardized rate card, so they can compete on their own merits: * We have the best CDN/apps/software support * We have a better recommendation/discovery experience (which could include "positive curation" like "we could license everything, but our niche is Namibian Sitcoms From 1983, so we won't") * We'll cut corners (lesser encoding quality to save disc/bandwidth, or no bespoke speculative content creation) to deliver the cheapest possible experience. The "content people" and "tech people" come from different universes with different skills and expectations, and having to wrangle the two into individual platform teams helps nobody.
Osiris 3y ago
“Huge cable bills” - we’re already back there. Netflix is $23, Apple TV just increased to $10c Disney+ is now $14, Hulu is $20, Max is $16, Paramount is $10, Peacock is $6. You can easily spend $100 /mn on streaming services.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Prices have been creeping up (and Netflix is the worst offender). But, if you can live without live TV and can do without that one show on such and such a service, it's still a pretty good deal relative to the cable TV bundle especially if you also had one or two premium stations/streaming services like HBO.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    $7.99 in 2010 is $11.27 today. The remaining $4.22 delta is reasonable given that their business model has changed from purely licensing with zero competition to being locked out of popular content and forced to produce their own.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Oh, I understand the reasons. It's just one of services where my monthly payments are yellow to red on my radar. I keep them but it's on the bubble.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      And now the actors unions and writers unions are going to get more money from streaming.
- bmy78 3y ago
  No one says you have to subscribe to ALL of the streaming platforms at once. If cost is an issue, pick 1 or 2 services, watch the shows you’re interested in, then cancel those and pick 1 or 2. Rince and repeat. You have choice with this approach and you don’t need every service offered.
Aerbil313 3y ago
The fragmentation is a phase until the industry matures. Take a look at other industries, like woodworking. They have established practices which don’t change much. The software industry has so much potential I don’t expect it to mature for another hundred years. Although some patterns are emerging, like strong typing and universal cross-platform runtimes (most notably Web).
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Yes because cross platform frameworks like Electron and before that Java Spring were the bees knees
- bdw5204 3y ago
  There's enormous incentive for somebody to create a tool that actually lets you "write once, run everywhere" by automatically compiling your code to the right format for every platform. This would dramatically reduce development time for companies that have to support multiple platforms which means they'd be willing to pay a substantial sum of money for it. You already kind of have something along those lines with game development where (I believe) the most popular engines like Unreal and Unity can export to every popular gaming platform. Web development also allows that which is why everything is becoming a web site. But native apps have significant performance advantages over something like Electron that bundles a web site and a browser. Currently, there is no way that I'm aware of to generate a true native app with the correct look and feel for the platform and reasonably optimized for every platform from the same code but there should be.
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    There is Tauri. Afaik it’s like Electron but doesn’t bundle a browser and instead uses the existing “native” browser on the system. This means you can have 100 Tauri apps and they won’t be any more performance intensive than having 100 open browser tabs.
hotnfresh 3y ago
> The fragmentation is both a flaw and a feature It’d be purely a feature if we banned shared ownership of distribution and production, like we did with movie studios and movie theaters for decades.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  This is monumentally a bad idea. Do you really want to ban all producers from being able to distribute their own goods and depend on middlemen? Whether you know it or not, since the 1930s things have changed, TVs are popular, there is this thing called the internet and websites. Do you also want to ban software developers and song writers from being able to publish their own work on websites?
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    > Do you really want to ban all producers from being able to distribute their own goods and depend on middlemen? Yes. > Whether you know it or not, since the 1930s things have changed, TVs are popular, there is this thing called the internet and websites. So? > Do you also want to ban software developers and song writers from being able to publish their own work on websites? Maybe. It doesn't appear to be a problem yet, but if it is then let's pursue that option.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      You agree with the fact that iOS developers must go through the App Store? Would you want it to be illegal for you to distribute any content you produce and for you to have to go through a middle man? Does that also mean if that I wanted to create my own Indy movie I couldn’t sell it on my own website? How does it help the consumer for all content to have to go through a middle man where they get a cut? And it matters because the law was there in the thirties when the only way to get movie content out was via the movie theaters. Now anyone can publish content
      - bawolff 3y ago
StableAlkyne 3y ago
I wonder if anyone is saving statistics on torrent traffic. It was huge in the 00s, then dropped as streaming became a thing. Now that the companies are back to rent-chasing (it's abhorrent that some of them still show ads even when you pay), it would be interesting to see what the numbers look like. Could be cool to compare to music, because Spotify and Pandora have been relatively not scummy.
01100011 3y ago
I'd love to see the feds step in and force content providers to make their content available to anyone willing to make a compliant (sorry, DRM likely required)frontend. I should be able to buy content from, say, Paramount using Hulu and not be forced to use Paramount's app.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  It’s called a web browser. You are free to connect a PC to your TV now.
jncfhnb 3y ago
The answer is streaming sites like SFlix
cherrycherry98 3y ago
I would like to see a standardized streaming protocol be developed. That way there can be a market for the client side (different apps that organize content you've subscribed to) and for the server side (like web servers are commodities). It would eliminate content providers having to roll their own streaming back ends and front end apps for so many platforms.
- rollcat 3y ago
  > I would like to see a standardized streaming protocol be developed. Like... HLS? > It would eliminate content providers having to roll their own streaming back ends and front end apps for so many platforms. Oh you mean metadata. Forget it. We built a live streaming service specializing in classical works (opera, ballet...), and even within that tiny particular niche, nobody can agree what "standardized" metadata should look like.
  - cherrycherry98 3y ago
    Yeah more than HLS. It would need to handle authentication and authorization such as is the user subscribed and what content is available them that they may have purchased a la carte. It would need listing of available content for search and indexing by the client. Presumably the major forms of content are standalone (ie movies), series which are a collection of content broken up into seasons, and potentially live streams. Finally it needs a way to purchase new content. The industry is standardized enough to agree on distribution formats (VHS, DVD, etc) and to have awards for different established categories and video rental companies used to be able to organize their collections well enough. I want studios to handle distribution, that is operating a streaming farm for their content, and get out of owning the storefront. I want a digital Blockbuster type experience with everyone's content commingled. No having to go to the Disney store, and the HBO store, and the Paramount store and oh last month this content was on Netflix and now I can't find it because it's on Amazon this month.
    - rollcat 3y ago
      In the system we built, some content was live, some was VOD, some was covered by subscription, some could be purchased individually, some was free (sponsored by a patron org that needed attribution), some was available all year round and some only for a very limited period. On top of that we supported purchases/subscriptions on every major mobile/TV platform and then some - all shared, so when you paid on AppleTV, you could watch it on the web, etc. This included working around platform-specific brain damage, e.g. on Amazon FireTV you can only offer VOD content purchases through Amazon's own catalogue. This also included interoperating with local vendors running the most oddball systems you'd ever witness. Because of this complexity (which "only" reflected real-world streaming rights deals), we needed a hero UX designer and tight collaboration between frontend, backend, video, and design teams. Forget devops, we have VideoOps. If you think you can draft a standard that covers each and every possible case, I will happily rate it - the measurement unit is blood sweat and tears. If it gets a 10/10, I will personally rewrite every part of our system to comply - no joking.
c0wb0yc0d3r 3y ago
> It means we have diversity in media vendors, at the cost of a pretty high cognitive load to just watch something… which app is it on? So do you have a YouTube, Spotify, and an apple music sub? When it comes to music, I'm not sure I've once thought "which app?" The only reason the consumer has to think about it is greed. For something like this, I'm not sure I'll ever buy a streaming device with a JavaScript interface. Steam has one, and it's slower than the old one by far. Who am I kidding, I'm not gonna buy it because I don't need Amazon "sidewalk"
- scarface_74 3y ago
  The 2nd and 3rd generation AppleTV “apps” were just web pages running on the WebKit engine. They were really responsive and better standardized.
m463 3y ago
> huge cable bills now we have to pay for the internet + streaming service(s) and most "big" internet providers keep increasing their prices.

hakfoo 3y ago

The answer is mandatory licensing. Maybe permit some limited ability to offer a very narrow window of exclusivity (weeks, not years) in exchange for getting a lower rate later (because we should treat attempts to wall off parts of shared culture as a an antisocial act, rather than a nifty business model.) Every platform can have everything, at a predictable standardized rate card, so they can compete on their own merits: * We have the best CDN/apps/software support * We have a better recommendation/discovery experience (which could include "positive curation" like "we could license everything, but our niche is Namibian Sitcoms From 1983, so we won't") * We'll cut corners (lesser encoding quality to save disc/bandwidth, or no bespoke speculative content creation) to deliver the cheapest possible experience. The "content people" and "tech people" come from different universes with different skills and expectations, and having to wrangle the two into individual platform teams helps nobody.

Osiris 3y ago

“Huge cable bills” - we’re already back there. Netflix is $23, Apple TV just increased to $10c Disney+ is now $14, Hulu is $20, Max is $16, Paramount is $10, Peacock is $6. You can easily spend $100 /mn on streaming services.

ghaff 3y ago
Prices have been creeping up (and Netflix is the worst offender). But, if you can live without live TV and can do without that one show on such and such a service, it's still a pretty good deal relative to the cable TV bundle especially if you also had one or two premium stations/streaming services like HBO.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  $7.99 in 2010 is $11.27 today. The remaining $4.22 delta is reasonable given that their business model has changed from purely licensing with zero competition to being locked out of popular content and forced to produce their own.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Oh, I understand the reasons. It's just one of services where my monthly payments are yellow to red on my radar. I keep them but it's on the bubble.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    And now the actors unions and writers unions are going to get more money from streaming.
bmy78 3y ago
No one says you have to subscribe to ALL of the streaming platforms at once. If cost is an issue, pick 1 or 2 services, watch the shows you’re interested in, then cancel those and pick 1 or 2. Rince and repeat. You have choice with this approach and you don’t need every service offered.

Aerbil313 3y ago

The fragmentation is a phase until the industry matures. Take a look at other industries, like woodworking. They have established practices which don’t change much. The software industry has so much potential I don’t expect it to mature for another hundred years. Although some patterns are emerging, like strong typing and universal cross-platform runtimes (most notably Web).

scarface_74 3y ago
Yes because cross platform frameworks like Electron and before that Java Spring were the bees knees
bdw5204 3y ago
There's enormous incentive for somebody to create a tool that actually lets you "write once, run everywhere" by automatically compiling your code to the right format for every platform. This would dramatically reduce development time for companies that have to support multiple platforms which means they'd be willing to pay a substantial sum of money for it. You already kind of have something along those lines with game development where (I believe) the most popular engines like Unreal and Unity can export to every popular gaming platform. Web development also allows that which is why everything is becoming a web site. But native apps have significant performance advantages over something like Electron that bundles a web site and a browser. Currently, there is no way that I'm aware of to generate a true native app with the correct look and feel for the platform and reasonably optimized for every platform from the same code but there should be.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  There is Tauri. Afaik it’s like Electron but doesn’t bundle a browser and instead uses the existing “native” browser on the system. This means you can have 100 Tauri apps and they won’t be any more performance intensive than having 100 open browser tabs.

hotnfresh 3y ago

> The fragmentation is both a flaw and a feature It’d be purely a feature if we banned shared ownership of distribution and production, like we did with movie studios and movie theaters for decades.

scarface_74 3y ago
This is monumentally a bad idea. Do you really want to ban all producers from being able to distribute their own goods and depend on middlemen? Whether you know it or not, since the 1930s things have changed, TVs are popular, there is this thing called the internet and websites. Do you also want to ban software developers and song writers from being able to publish their own work on websites?
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > Do you really want to ban all producers from being able to distribute their own goods and depend on middlemen? Yes. > Whether you know it or not, since the 1930s things have changed, TVs are popular, there is this thing called the internet and websites. So? > Do you also want to ban software developers and song writers from being able to publish their own work on websites? Maybe. It doesn't appear to be a problem yet, but if it is then let's pursue that option.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    You agree with the fact that iOS developers must go through the App Store? Would you want it to be illegal for you to distribute any content you produce and for you to have to go through a middle man? Does that also mean if that I wanted to create my own Indy movie I couldn’t sell it on my own website? How does it help the consumer for all content to have to go through a middle man where they get a cut? And it matters because the law was there in the thirties when the only way to get movie content out was via the movie theaters. Now anyone can publish content
    - bawolff 3y ago

StableAlkyne 3y ago

I wonder if anyone is saving statistics on torrent traffic. It was huge in the 00s, then dropped as streaming became a thing. Now that the companies are back to rent-chasing (it's abhorrent that some of them still show ads even when you pay), it would be interesting to see what the numbers look like. Could be cool to compare to music, because Spotify and Pandora have been relatively not scummy.

01100011 3y ago

I'd love to see the feds step in and force content providers to make their content available to anyone willing to make a compliant (sorry, DRM likely required)frontend. I should be able to buy content from, say, Paramount using Hulu and not be forced to use Paramount's app.

scarface_74 3y ago
It’s called a web browser. You are free to connect a PC to your TV now.

jncfhnb 3y ago

The answer is streaming sites like SFlix

cherrycherry98 3y ago

I would like to see a standardized streaming protocol be developed. That way there can be a market for the client side (different apps that organize content you've subscribed to) and for the server side (like web servers are commodities). It would eliminate content providers having to roll their own streaming back ends and front end apps for so many platforms.

rollcat 3y ago
> I would like to see a standardized streaming protocol be developed. Like... HLS? > It would eliminate content providers having to roll their own streaming back ends and front end apps for so many platforms. Oh you mean metadata. Forget it. We built a live streaming service specializing in classical works (opera, ballet...), and even within that tiny particular niche, nobody can agree what "standardized" metadata should look like.
- cherrycherry98 3y ago
  Yeah more than HLS. It would need to handle authentication and authorization such as is the user subscribed and what content is available them that they may have purchased a la carte. It would need listing of available content for search and indexing by the client. Presumably the major forms of content are standalone (ie movies), series which are a collection of content broken up into seasons, and potentially live streams. Finally it needs a way to purchase new content. The industry is standardized enough to agree on distribution formats (VHS, DVD, etc) and to have awards for different established categories and video rental companies used to be able to organize their collections well enough. I want studios to handle distribution, that is operating a streaming farm for their content, and get out of owning the storefront. I want a digital Blockbuster type experience with everyone's content commingled. No having to go to the Disney store, and the HBO store, and the Paramount store and oh last month this content was on Netflix and now I can't find it because it's on Amazon this month.
  - rollcat 3y ago
    In the system we built, some content was live, some was VOD, some was covered by subscription, some could be purchased individually, some was free (sponsored by a patron org that needed attribution), some was available all year round and some only for a very limited period. On top of that we supported purchases/subscriptions on every major mobile/TV platform and then some - all shared, so when you paid on AppleTV, you could watch it on the web, etc. This included working around platform-specific brain damage, e.g. on Amazon FireTV you can only offer VOD content purchases through Amazon's own catalogue. This also included interoperating with local vendors running the most oddball systems you'd ever witness. Because of this complexity (which "only" reflected real-world streaming rights deals), we needed a hero UX designer and tight collaboration between frontend, backend, video, and design teams. Forget devops, we have VideoOps. If you think you can draft a standard that covers each and every possible case, I will happily rate it - the measurement unit is blood sweat and tears. If it gets a 10/10, I will personally rewrite every part of our system to comply - no joking.

c0wb0yc0d3r 3y ago

> It means we have diversity in media vendors, at the cost of a pretty high cognitive load to just watch something… which app is it on? So do you have a YouTube, Spotify, and an apple music sub? When it comes to music, I'm not sure I've once thought "which app?" The only reason the consumer has to think about it is greed. For something like this, I'm not sure I'll ever buy a streaming device with a JavaScript interface. Steam has one, and it's slower than the old one by far. Who am I kidding, I'm not gonna buy it because I don't need Amazon "sidewalk"

scarface_74 3y ago
The 2nd and 3rd generation AppleTV “apps” were just web pages running on the WebKit engine. They were really responsive and better standardized.

m463 3y ago

> huge cable bills now we have to pay for the internet + streaming service(s) and most "big" internet providers keep increasing their prices.