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>> I assume that bandwidth is by far the biggest cost for running your own streaming service, so letting Google take that hit makes a lot of sense. Judging fro

>> I assume that bandwidth is by far the biggest cost for running your own streaming service, so letting Google take that hit makes a lot of sense. Judging from the clunky, buggy, nonsensical experiences on 2nd tier streaming services (i.e., everything except Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney+, Max), I'd say the biggest cost is probably hiring a decent Engineering+Product+Test team. There are complexities here, like making these things work on different TV brands, versions, older models, etc. Pushing all the complexity to YT seems like a total no-brainer.

jmholla 2y ago
> Judging from the clunky, buggy, nonsensical experiences on 2nd tier streaming services (i.e., everything except Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney+, Max) With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. I run into an at least issue daily (usually multiple times a day) in every streaming app I use except Netflix.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. Yeah it's really annoying that they all recreated the wheel instead of just playing ball with netflix or paying netflix to license their technology. The only feature I miss from another service is that x-ray view stuff that Amazon has to let you know who is in a scene.
  - sfilmeyer 2y ago
    >or paying netflix to license their technology Does Netflix license their technology to anyone? I know of examples like BAMTech, although I don't even know if they still take on outside clients or just do Disney now. I get that their might be good options to license and that fewer companies should build crappy in-house products, but is Netflix one of them? From Netflix's perspective, it's not clear to me that the payment for licensing technology to e.g. NBC is worth it, versus hoping that they end up with an inferior product, especially when they're competing with each other for customers and licensed content.
    - Yizahi 2y ago
      I don't know about Netflix specifically, but some companies do sell all-in-one package solution to create your own kinda Neflix on prem. Don't know how great these solutions are, but I imagine with sufficient budget they should work ok.
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      I don't know if they license it specifically, or if anyone has even approached them about it. I do think it's ridiculous that all of these companies are making their own solutions that are all terrible. What they really should do is license their content to netflix for a fair price and just let netflix be the service people use.
      - Mindwipe 2y ago
        Why do you think Netflix wants to buy it? There is no point buying everything as a streaming provider. It doesn't get you more customers and it costs money. Heck, Apple will not even let you put up anything on the iTunes store to purchase - they have to be very confident it will recoup their costs for encoding, ingest time etc etc.
        TuringNYC 2y ago
        >> There is no point buying everything as a streaming provider. It doesn't get you more customers and it costs money. The way Amazon prime does it is much like a traditional cable provider -- you can opt into channels (e.g., Hallmark channel) for additional fees per month. Everything purchased appears on Amazon as a universal bucket of content, same UI same everything. Amazon appears to handle the tech and billing. As a consumer, it is beautiful -- you can subscribe and unsubscribe from services monthly, rather than waiting for some once-every-3-yrs renewal contract. You can do everything online rather than waiting an hour for customer service. And thank heavens you dont need to install some random half-baked streaming "App" via the Samsung TV App store. I'm assuming Amazon takes a cut of the monthly fee. If the MRR of the monthly cut Amazon gets is higher than the cost to deliver, it is a first order win. I assume the marginal engineering work is trivial. I also assume the only marginal costs are the extra metered cost of bandwidth, storage, etc. I do think there is an issue though -- if the cost of the bundler (Amazon in this case) gets too high, I can see consumers scared off by this ever-increasing bill (Imagine you had a $50/mo netflix bill for example.) Of course, for Amazon this isnt a problem since practically every human I know has a load of random Amazon Marketplace charges on their credit card already they cannot reconcile anyway.
- deelowe 2y ago
  I LOATHE peacock. I don't know what checks they do at the start of the stream, but they always peg me at 720p or lower resolution despite having over 300mb. Its not an issue on any other streaming app and they give you no option to set it manually. Streams look like a dog's breakfast on my 4k TVs.
  - palmotea 2y ago
    I wonder if that's more an issue with them than you. I subscribed to peacock for one month during the Olympics, and it was terrible. Streams frequently were stuck at something super-low 320p, or just halted to that stupid sad cat error page. Cutesy error pages are cute exactly once, then they're even worse than a minimally viable error page.
  - znpy 2y ago
    Maybe the issue is on their side. Their best outcome is you paying for 4k hdr and streaming 720p. Bandwidth is expensive and slow to provision.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      > Bandwidth is expensive and slow to provision. Not enough to hurt a paid service. Let's say 6Mbps for pretty solid 1080p. And at peak maybe we have .5 streams per account going simultaneously (I bet the real number is significantly lower). So we need 3Mbps per account. How much does a Mbps cost? "Across key cities in the U.S. and Europe, 400 GigE prices range from $0.07 to $0.08 per Mbps." Peacock doesn't even offer 4K most of the time or on the olympics, but for services that do a $1 upcharge should be more than enough to cover the bandwidth difference.
      - deelowe 2y ago
        I'd be happy with 1080p.
      - dylan604 2y ago
        Who does 6Mbps for 1080p? I thought HD topped out at 3Mbps, and 4K was around the 6+Mbps
- jampekka 2y ago
  Gotta love how streaming torrents through shady debrid and indexing services with Stremio is a smoother experience than what these megacorporations with massive budgets manage to scrape together.
  - flkenosad 2y ago
    Shout out to all the devs who never sold their souls.
    - 1oooqooq 2y ago
      except all those "consumer friedly" torrent things are the definition of selling one's soul.
      - jampekka 2y ago
        In what sense? Leeching?
        1oooqooq 2y ago
        most of the clients are ripped off open source and sold for profit/subscription. and filled to the brim with trojans and adware.
        hedora 2y ago
        Isn’t that the same as 99% of commercial phone apps? (Not defending it; I’m just saying it compares favorably with whatever crap is in most non-pirate apps.)
        jampekka 2y ago
        Stremio is (mostly) open source and doesn't cost a penny and AFAIK has no malware. It does sometimes have some ads, about which they are very open about. Debrid and torrent indexing services are simple websites/APIs with some mostly proprietary hacked together backends. Some of them have subscriptions, but you know what you buy if you subscribe, and many don't even have recurring payments. Someone probably makes some profit out of those, but I'd guess the margins are quite slim, and there's a lot of competition. There are surely a lot of scams out there too, but I'm quite well aware what my $3 per month buys and I know better what I'm installing or downloading than with any commercial services. Majority of what's happening underneath is done by the saints of the scene, taking huge risks for zero pay.
- cs-78 2y ago
  YouTube painful to use compared to Netflix ? Last week I noticed my video froze on netflix while audio moved ahead.
- TuringNYC 2y ago
  >> With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. I agree -- if I could separate these out into 3 categories rather than 2, Netflix/YT would be in a class of their own, way ahead of the pack. I am constantly surprised how Apple TV offers such a poor experience despite their excellence in Product Management in other product areas. I was watching Apple TV last night and my wife and I slogged thru the recap and intro because we were so afraid of the app chocking on the "Skip" button. Aside from Apple, which seems to be a Product Management issue, I find other platforms to bucket into two areas: 1. Poor performance, probably due to bad threading and poor cacheing 2. Incompatibility with older TVs. TVs last 8-10yrs easily these days, and features have topped off so people do not upgrade. This means you have a LOT of target builds and compatibility to check and I dont think they test all the possible builds.
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    What device are you using? I use Apple TVs, and Apple TV+ is consistently extremely high quality streaming for me. YouTube is incredibly painful to use because their tvOS UI is garbage. Quality's OK, though.
    - TuringNYC 2y ago
      I'm using an Apple TV (device) to stream Apple TV (the streaming service.) Streaming quality is great, so agree on that. It is the bugginess of the app. For example, with the Apple TV native remote, the silly touchpad is super clunky, painfully lacking the exponential fast forwarding i'm so used to with better services. The experience with the Samsung remote is very buggy. For example, when the "Dismiss" or "Skip" button shows up, the focus isnt the button, so you press it and the show stops and goes back to the main screen. The buttons dont properly highlight when scrolling, the difference is so subtle it is hard to know what you are selecting (or not) With the remote, it is easy to over or underscroll because of the sensitivity of the touchpad.
      - thawkth 2y ago
        Honestly I turned the touchpad off within a few minutes of getting my Apple TV When I got my second I decided to try again and that lasted all of five minutes. I love my Apple TV otherwise (well after that and making the home button a home button instead of an Apple TV+ button!)
- eru 2y ago
  I have about the same number of issues with Netflix as with Youtube (with Youtube being perhaps slightly better). I agree that eg Disney+ is a bit rougher around the edges.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  > With the exception of Netflix, Not sure where this come from, I have been unsubscribed for a few months so my experience is not current but back in mid 2024 I got video not showing up with some obscure error codes once in a while.
  - hedora 2y ago
    Yeah; of those, Netflix has been the second least reliable for me. It is a bit better now. I think part of the problem is their dumb microservices architecture. They operate something like 10,000 microservices and different devices talk to different subsets of those. On our old, cheap roku stick, they regularly would produce “could not stream” errors or fallback to screenshots instead of trailers (which was actually better!) more often than not. The website would be fine, and no one else I know noticed the outages. The worst thing is that I’ve worked at places that have moron middle managers that actually decided to emulate this and moved to microservices. It wasted years of my life at work.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  The UK Channel4 app can't even get the ratio right for whole series of some programs. (Programs that were 4:3 but they warp it the wrong way, and still have big black bars at the margins {I think it's called overscan?})
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  And incredibly badly designed. Like not supporting type-ahead, so after you hit -> to skip ahead, you have to wait until it streams the next 10 seconds of video to skip over, before hitting -> to skip ahead the next 10 seconds. Forces people to pirate content just so they can view it in vlc.
dade_ 2y ago
don’t forget the burning paper bag of shit that is Paramount+ on PS5. There is no shame anymore.
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  It's gotten better over the past couple of years. Even Disney+ has a lot of issues like some kid shows will play like 10 minutes of end credits after an episode instead of going to the next one. Not sure if that is finally fixed. In general, Netflix is still light-years ahead of the competition.
- organsnyder 2y ago
  Paramount+ on iOS was terrible the last time I used it, too. I tend to binge Star Trek on flights, so I like to download a bunch of episodes. Paramount+ had such a terrible experience (at least 10% of the time videos would be downright corrupted), I ended up cancelling my standalone subscription and getting it through Apple TV so I could use the Apple TV app.
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    The Apple TV app is 100% the only way to cope with Paramount+. Of all the streaming services I use regularly -- Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, YouTube -- it's the only one that doesn't work for me more often than not when using the app directly.
Uehreka 2y ago
Yeah, “a decent video player” feels like something that should be table-stakes commodity stuff, there are certainly a fair number of good open source video player components and toolkits with customizable skins and support for tons of playback formats and protocols. But no, this is actually something billion dollar companies struggle with.
- runevault 2y ago
  Because the player is only the first step. Then you need all the other stuff like a CDN distribution to get it close enough to all your subscribers/able to handle all the subscribers pulling down video. I'd be shocked if the core player that just shows pixels on the screen is anyones' problem at this point.
- mrkramer 2y ago
  I'm surprised that there isn't a standardized open source web video player which all websites use so users have the same video player experience and features across the web. Usually commercial or "free" video players are bad like JW player or whatever freemium players there are. There are open source HTML players tho but they are not as powerful and feature rich as YouTube player. I remember watching IGN gaming videos on their website's player and the experience was horrible. Tbh idk what's the best open source video player out there right now.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    Video.js does a pretty good job. Most of these places seem to choose to have a bad experience, by not understanding what they're doing and getting a terrible vendor solution. Often triggered by DRM panic.
Epa095 2y ago
Some years ago I worked for a company creating streaming platforms for media companies, aka the clunky shit you complain about:-) My experience the clunkyness comes primarily from two things. 1: Every customer wants their own twist. It is not enough to create an awesome video player app and reskin it, no they all want to be special. 2: Getting the last 5% takes twice as much work as the first 95%. Probably even more. It's quite doable for 'normal' engineers to make a steaming platform. You need to get the video files out there on some CDN, you need some service for the DRM keys (which needs to scale, and handle the different access packages), and you probably want some history and profile stuff. Easy enough. But for the best experience you want every video to start playing in less than a second. That means getting those starting video segments as close as possible to the customer, it means optimizing that DRM key delivery, and optimizing the player so it just gets that video pushed to the screen ASAP.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > But for the best experience you want every video to start playing in less than a second. Even Netflix and Disney+ do not have that. The TV also takes some time to respond.
  - Epa095 2y ago
    Netflix is superior to Disney+ in this regard (at least on my TV). And on my TV Netflix manages sub-second (at least sometimes). IDK how. Maybe they somehow give me the DRM keys ahead of time? Maybe everything in the "continue watching" is pre-approved? Maybe the first couple of seconds are handled differently, maybe they are not DRM protected? Maybe the netflix intro logo thingy is cached locally, and then stuff happends in the background? It is after all more pleasant to hear the intro sound that watch a spinning loading-thingy. Maybe as I move the selection across stuff they pre-emptively fetch the first seconds? In some cases it also seems to start auto-playing in the background, so the only thing that happends when I press a selection is that the GUI overlay dissapears.
- bobbob1921 2y ago
  I can imagine that the DRM part is a difficult problem, however, why is DRM so important and require so much focus? I ask as the end goal of protecting the content is meaningless as I’ve yet to see content that does NOT end up on Pirate sites in perfect quality. (so why put so much effort into drm if it’s going to end up on pirate sites anyway.). Especially if DRM is causing UI issues or slowing down the experience. (I could be wrong about some of this as I’m not in the streamin specific industry.)
DonHopkins 2y ago
Maybe this means they just fired a decent Engineering+Product+Test team.
xorcist 2y ago
I blame modern software development methodologies which value feature pushing and ceremonies above well working basic functionality. Look at something like the CCC video streaming site. Hyper focused on its thing, works wonders, developed entirely by volunteers with the help of academia. If volunteers can do something on a shoestring budget, why can't Disney or Amazon with close to unlimited budgets approach even a fraction of the usability?
mfrommil 2y ago
>> I'd say the biggest cost is probably hiring a decent Engineering+Product+Test team Part of it is cost, but a lot is culture and leadership. Streaming (especially live) is one of the toughest areas to maintain a good user experience. I've led Streaming Product teams for years. Product teams almost always needs to deliver growth, which comes in the form of new features, monetization, and other changes. But the user cares most about the core experience - did the video start playing without a delay? Were there buffering issues? Audio playback out of sync? Issues are very noticeable, and sometimes very difficult to test proactively for. Product needs to find this balance, and can not go 100% all in on growth and neglect the not sexy stuff. If the whole Product/Engineering/Test org is not aligned on stability/QoE being a top priority, it can degrade very quickly after a few releases for a streaming app.
Melatonic 2y ago
I'd imagine the biggest cost might be not hiring a decent engineering team - since then you are probably spending a boatload more on server costs and bandwidth and losing customers due to bugs and glitches
deanishe 2y ago
YT is top tier? Oof. The app is so full of click-me dark patterns, it feels more like an iffy porn site than the product of a major tech corp.

jmholla 2y ago

> Judging from the clunky, buggy, nonsensical experiences on 2nd tier streaming services (i.e., everything except Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney+, Max) With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. I run into an at least issue daily (usually multiple times a day) in every streaming app I use except Netflix.

Suppafly 2y ago
>With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. Yeah it's really annoying that they all recreated the wheel instead of just playing ball with netflix or paying netflix to license their technology. The only feature I miss from another service is that x-ray view stuff that Amazon has to let you know who is in a scene.
- sfilmeyer 2y ago
  >or paying netflix to license their technology Does Netflix license their technology to anyone? I know of examples like BAMTech, although I don't even know if they still take on outside clients or just do Disney now. I get that their might be good options to license and that fewer companies should build crappy in-house products, but is Netflix one of them? From Netflix's perspective, it's not clear to me that the payment for licensing technology to e.g. NBC is worth it, versus hoping that they end up with an inferior product, especially when they're competing with each other for customers and licensed content.
  - Yizahi 2y ago
    I don't know about Netflix specifically, but some companies do sell all-in-one package solution to create your own kinda Neflix on prem. Don't know how great these solutions are, but I imagine with sufficient budget they should work ok.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    I don't know if they license it specifically, or if anyone has even approached them about it. I do think it's ridiculous that all of these companies are making their own solutions that are all terrible. What they really should do is license their content to netflix for a fair price and just let netflix be the service people use.
    - Mindwipe 2y ago
      Why do you think Netflix wants to buy it? There is no point buying everything as a streaming provider. It doesn't get you more customers and it costs money. Heck, Apple will not even let you put up anything on the iTunes store to purchase - they have to be very confident it will recoup their costs for encoding, ingest time etc etc.
      - TuringNYC 2y ago
        >> There is no point buying everything as a streaming provider. It doesn't get you more customers and it costs money. The way Amazon prime does it is much like a traditional cable provider -- you can opt into channels (e.g., Hallmark channel) for additional fees per month. Everything purchased appears on Amazon as a universal bucket of content, same UI same everything. Amazon appears to handle the tech and billing. As a consumer, it is beautiful -- you can subscribe and unsubscribe from services monthly, rather than waiting for some once-every-3-yrs renewal contract. You can do everything online rather than waiting an hour for customer service. And thank heavens you dont need to install some random half-baked streaming "App" via the Samsung TV App store. I'm assuming Amazon takes a cut of the monthly fee. If the MRR of the monthly cut Amazon gets is higher than the cost to deliver, it is a first order win. I assume the marginal engineering work is trivial. I also assume the only marginal costs are the extra metered cost of bandwidth, storage, etc. I do think there is an issue though -- if the cost of the bundler (Amazon in this case) gets too high, I can see consumers scared off by this ever-increasing bill (Imagine you had a $50/mo netflix bill for example.) Of course, for Amazon this isnt a problem since practically every human I know has a load of random Amazon Marketplace charges on their credit card already they cannot reconcile anyway.
deelowe 2y ago
I LOATHE peacock. I don't know what checks they do at the start of the stream, but they always peg me at 720p or lower resolution despite having over 300mb. Its not an issue on any other streaming app and they give you no option to set it manually. Streams look like a dog's breakfast on my 4k TVs.
- palmotea 2y ago
  I wonder if that's more an issue with them than you. I subscribed to peacock for one month during the Olympics, and it was terrible. Streams frequently were stuck at something super-low 320p, or just halted to that stupid sad cat error page. Cutesy error pages are cute exactly once, then they're even worse than a minimally viable error page.
- znpy 2y ago
  Maybe the issue is on their side. Their best outcome is you paying for 4k hdr and streaming 720p. Bandwidth is expensive and slow to provision.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    > Bandwidth is expensive and slow to provision. Not enough to hurt a paid service. Let's say 6Mbps for pretty solid 1080p. And at peak maybe we have .5 streams per account going simultaneously (I bet the real number is significantly lower). So we need 3Mbps per account. How much does a Mbps cost? "Across key cities in the U.S. and Europe, 400 GigE prices range from $0.07 to $0.08 per Mbps." Peacock doesn't even offer 4K most of the time or on the olympics, but for services that do a $1 upcharge should be more than enough to cover the bandwidth difference.
    - deelowe 2y ago
      I'd be happy with 1080p.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      Who does 6Mbps for 1080p? I thought HD topped out at 3Mbps, and 4K was around the 6+Mbps
jampekka 2y ago
Gotta love how streaming torrents through shady debrid and indexing services with Stremio is a smoother experience than what these megacorporations with massive budgets manage to scrape together.
- flkenosad 2y ago
  Shout out to all the devs who never sold their souls.
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    except all those "consumer friedly" torrent things are the definition of selling one's soul.
    - jampekka 2y ago
      In what sense? Leeching?
      - 1oooqooq 2y ago
        most of the clients are ripped off open source and sold for profit/subscription. and filled to the brim with trojans and adware.
        hedora 2y ago
        Isn’t that the same as 99% of commercial phone apps? (Not defending it; I’m just saying it compares favorably with whatever crap is in most non-pirate apps.)
        jampekka 2y ago
        Stremio is (mostly) open source and doesn't cost a penny and AFAIK has no malware. It does sometimes have some ads, about which they are very open about. Debrid and torrent indexing services are simple websites/APIs with some mostly proprietary hacked together backends. Some of them have subscriptions, but you know what you buy if you subscribe, and many don't even have recurring payments. Someone probably makes some profit out of those, but I'd guess the margins are quite slim, and there's a lot of competition. There are surely a lot of scams out there too, but I'm quite well aware what my $3 per month buys and I know better what I'm installing or downloading than with any commercial services. Majority of what's happening underneath is done by the saints of the scene, taking huge risks for zero pay.
cs-78 2y ago
YouTube painful to use compared to Netflix ? Last week I noticed my video froze on netflix while audio moved ahead.
TuringNYC 2y ago
>> With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. I agree -- if I could separate these out into 3 categories rather than 2, Netflix/YT would be in a class of their own, way ahead of the pack. I am constantly surprised how Apple TV offers such a poor experience despite their excellence in Product Management in other product areas. I was watching Apple TV last night and my wife and I slogged thru the recap and intro because we were so afraid of the app chocking on the "Skip" button. Aside from Apple, which seems to be a Product Management issue, I find other platforms to bucket into two areas: 1. Poor performance, probably due to bad threading and poor cacheing 2. Incompatibility with older TVs. TVs last 8-10yrs easily these days, and features have topped off so people do not upgrade. This means you have a LOT of target builds and compatibility to check and I dont think they test all the possible builds.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  What device are you using? I use Apple TVs, and Apple TV+ is consistently extremely high quality streaming for me. YouTube is incredibly painful to use because their tvOS UI is garbage. Quality's OK, though.
  - TuringNYC 2y ago
    I'm using an Apple TV (device) to stream Apple TV (the streaming service.) Streaming quality is great, so agree on that. It is the bugginess of the app. For example, with the Apple TV native remote, the silly touchpad is super clunky, painfully lacking the exponential fast forwarding i'm so used to with better services. The experience with the Samsung remote is very buggy. For example, when the "Dismiss" or "Skip" button shows up, the focus isnt the button, so you press it and the show stops and goes back to the main screen. The buttons dont properly highlight when scrolling, the difference is so subtle it is hard to know what you are selecting (or not) With the remote, it is easy to over or underscroll because of the sensitivity of the touchpad.
    - thawkth 2y ago
      Honestly I turned the touchpad off within a few minutes of getting my Apple TV When I got my second I decided to try again and that lasted all of five minutes. I love my Apple TV otherwise (well after that and making the home button a home button instead of an Apple TV+ button!)
eru 2y ago
I have about the same number of issues with Netflix as with Youtube (with Youtube being perhaps slightly better). I agree that eg Disney+ is a bit rougher around the edges.
prmoustache 2y ago
> With the exception of Netflix, Not sure where this come from, I have been unsubscribed for a few months so my experience is not current but back in mid 2024 I got video not showing up with some obscure error codes once in a while.
- hedora 2y ago
  Yeah; of those, Netflix has been the second least reliable for me. It is a bit better now. I think part of the problem is their dumb microservices architecture. They operate something like 10,000 microservices and different devices talk to different subsets of those. On our old, cheap roku stick, they regularly would produce “could not stream” errors or fallback to screenshots instead of trailers (which was actually better!) more often than not. The website would be fine, and no one else I know noticed the outages. The worst thing is that I’ve worked at places that have moron middle managers that actually decided to emulate this and moved to microservices. It wasted years of my life at work.
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
The UK Channel4 app can't even get the ratio right for whole series of some programs. (Programs that were 4:3 but they warp it the wrong way, and still have big black bars at the margins {I think it's called overscan?})
DonHopkins 2y ago
And incredibly badly designed. Like not supporting type-ahead, so after you hit -> to skip ahead, you have to wait until it streams the next 10 seconds of video to skip over, before hitting -> to skip ahead the next 10 seconds. Forces people to pirate content just so they can view it in vlc.

dade_ 2y ago

don’t forget the burning paper bag of shit that is Paramount+ on PS5. There is no shame anymore.

7thaccount 2y ago
It's gotten better over the past couple of years. Even Disney+ has a lot of issues like some kid shows will play like 10 minutes of end credits after an episode instead of going to the next one. Not sure if that is finally fixed. In general, Netflix is still light-years ahead of the competition.
organsnyder 2y ago
Paramount+ on iOS was terrible the last time I used it, too. I tend to binge Star Trek on flights, so I like to download a bunch of episodes. Paramount+ had such a terrible experience (at least 10% of the time videos would be downright corrupted), I ended up cancelling my standalone subscription and getting it through Apple TV so I could use the Apple TV app.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  The Apple TV app is 100% the only way to cope with Paramount+. Of all the streaming services I use regularly -- Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, YouTube -- it's the only one that doesn't work for me more often than not when using the app directly.

Uehreka 2y ago

Yeah, “a decent video player” feels like something that should be table-stakes commodity stuff, there are certainly a fair number of good open source video player components and toolkits with customizable skins and support for tons of playback formats and protocols. But no, this is actually something billion dollar companies struggle with.

runevault 2y ago
Because the player is only the first step. Then you need all the other stuff like a CDN distribution to get it close enough to all your subscribers/able to handle all the subscribers pulling down video. I'd be shocked if the core player that just shows pixels on the screen is anyones' problem at this point.
mrkramer 2y ago
I'm surprised that there isn't a standardized open source web video player which all websites use so users have the same video player experience and features across the web. Usually commercial or "free" video players are bad like JW player or whatever freemium players there are. There are open source HTML players tho but they are not as powerful and feature rich as YouTube player. I remember watching IGN gaming videos on their website's player and the experience was horrible. Tbh idk what's the best open source video player out there right now.
- pjc50 2y ago
  Video.js does a pretty good job. Most of these places seem to choose to have a bad experience, by not understanding what they're doing and getting a terrible vendor solution. Often triggered by DRM panic.

Epa095 2y ago

Some years ago I worked for a company creating streaming platforms for media companies, aka the clunky shit you complain about:-) My experience the clunkyness comes primarily from two things. 1: Every customer wants their own twist. It is not enough to create an awesome video player app and reskin it, no they all want to be special. 2: Getting the last 5% takes twice as much work as the first 95%. Probably even more. It's quite doable for 'normal' engineers to make a steaming platform. You need to get the video files out there on some CDN, you need some service for the DRM keys (which needs to scale, and handle the different access packages), and you probably want some history and profile stuff. Easy enough. But for the best experience you want every video to start playing in less than a second. That means getting those starting video segments as close as possible to the customer, it means optimizing that DRM key delivery, and optimizing the player so it just gets that video pushed to the screen ASAP.

hulitu 2y ago
> But for the best experience you want every video to start playing in less than a second. Even Netflix and Disney+ do not have that. The TV also takes some time to respond.
- Epa095 2y ago
  Netflix is superior to Disney+ in this regard (at least on my TV). And on my TV Netflix manages sub-second (at least sometimes). IDK how. Maybe they somehow give me the DRM keys ahead of time? Maybe everything in the "continue watching" is pre-approved? Maybe the first couple of seconds are handled differently, maybe they are not DRM protected? Maybe the netflix intro logo thingy is cached locally, and then stuff happends in the background? It is after all more pleasant to hear the intro sound that watch a spinning loading-thingy. Maybe as I move the selection across stuff they pre-emptively fetch the first seconds? In some cases it also seems to start auto-playing in the background, so the only thing that happends when I press a selection is that the GUI overlay dissapears.
bobbob1921 2y ago
I can imagine that the DRM part is a difficult problem, however, why is DRM so important and require so much focus? I ask as the end goal of protecting the content is meaningless as I’ve yet to see content that does NOT end up on Pirate sites in perfect quality. (so why put so much effort into drm if it’s going to end up on pirate sites anyway.). Especially if DRM is causing UI issues or slowing down the experience. (I could be wrong about some of this as I’m not in the streamin specific industry.)

DonHopkins 2y ago

Maybe this means they just fired a decent Engineering+Product+Test team.

xorcist 2y ago

I blame modern software development methodologies which value feature pushing and ceremonies above well working basic functionality. Look at something like the CCC video streaming site. Hyper focused on its thing, works wonders, developed entirely by volunteers with the help of academia. If volunteers can do something on a shoestring budget, why can't Disney or Amazon with close to unlimited budgets approach even a fraction of the usability?

mfrommil 2y ago

>> I'd say the biggest cost is probably hiring a decent Engineering+Product+Test team Part of it is cost, but a lot is culture and leadership. Streaming (especially live) is one of the toughest areas to maintain a good user experience. I've led Streaming Product teams for years. Product teams almost always needs to deliver growth, which comes in the form of new features, monetization, and other changes. But the user cares most about the core experience - did the video start playing without a delay? Were there buffering issues? Audio playback out of sync? Issues are very noticeable, and sometimes very difficult to test proactively for. Product needs to find this balance, and can not go 100% all in on growth and neglect the not sexy stuff. If the whole Product/Engineering/Test org is not aligned on stability/QoE being a top priority, it can degrade very quickly after a few releases for a streaming app.

Melatonic 2y ago

I'd imagine the biggest cost might be not hiring a decent engineering team - since then you are probably spending a boatload more on server costs and bandwidth and losing customers due to bugs and glitches

deanishe 2y ago

YT is top tier? Oof. The app is so full of click-me dark patterns, it feels more like an iffy porn site than the product of a major tech corp.