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Re:Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again? by shadowgovt on Thursday January 05, 2023 @08:54AM (#34259533)
Add to that the fact that there's this disquieting connection between the IP ownership and the video tech.

Couple services with plenty of good content managed to put together teams to build their mobile / web apps that can barely code their ways out of a paper bag (in the non-trivial space of high-capacity video streaming, nonetheless). It's enough to make me yell "Just give me the damn file and I'll play it myself."

Re:Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again? by scarface74 on Thursday January 05, 2023 @09:45AM (#34260236)
Video tech for streaming is more or less off the shelf from cloud providers (disclaimer: I work for one).

As far as I know, the only two companies that have their own video streaming expertise of any note are Netflix and Disney (after the BAMTech acquisition).

Any other company with sufficient funding can outsource it.

Re:Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again? by shadowgovt on Thursday January 05, 2023 @11:14AM (#34261966)
So why does Paramount+ feel like it was put together by attention-deficit badgers relative to YouTube? Just age of software and years spent on polish?

Because there's basic fit-and-finish crap in that player that drives me positively bananas (things like "Doesn't remember your close-captioning setting" and "Doesn't let you change the setting when ads are playing"). And that's disregarding the 1 out of 50 times it fails to do the Chromecast-dance and leaves the Chromecast or the mobile device in a wacky state requiring software restarts (to their credit: that's down from approximately 1 in 10, so I've seen improvement there).

Re:Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again? by scarface74 on Thursday January 05, 2023 @11:22AM (#34262123)
I agree. But those are mostly standard UX issues not underlying video streaming issues.

But ChromeCast overall I’ve found to be crappy technology.

Re:Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again? by shadowgovt on Thursday January 05, 2023 @11:42AM (#34262495)
> Chromecast... crappy technology.

Absolutely 100% agree. Like Bluetooth and USB, it's built to work with a whole pile of stuff out in the real world that the devs didn't have access to for testing / didn't exist yet when it was standardized, so it's got some grabasstical corner cases.

... problem is, it's also got like 36 million users, so it's incumbent upon anything that claims to be a "streaming service" to account for those quirks to work in 36 million living rooms (in the same sense that it's not Bluetooth's "fault" when the new car or headphones on the market don't pair with already-existing popular brands of mobile phone).

If we had one streaming app to rule them all, it could consolidate the quirks fixes and we'd be all good. The fact that market competition means everyone has to solve for those quirks individually and is disincentivized to share solutions is a PITA for end users.

Re:Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again? by scarface74 on Thursday January 05, 2023 @11:50AM (#34262643)
Yet I don’t have that problem with AirPlay even with my $40 Roku sticks.
Re:Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again? by shadowgovt on Thursday January 05, 2023 @11:55AM (#34262725)
I'm not privy to the details of how AirPlay is configured, but knowing Apple, they probably built the streaming part of the protocol atop their own proprietary software tech stack (because that's how they usually solve these issues) and anyone who doesn't pay-to-play (with the corresponding cost burden of confirming interoperability with the infrastructure Apple built) is left out in the cold. Evidence I have for this is that you can control an AirPlay device from anything running Apple software (including a Windows machine running iTunes)... But not Android. Quick Googling confirms that the on-the-wire AirPlay protocol is undocumented.

That's Apple's style and it probably works better for an application like this (there are a lot of problems for which dictatorship is the solution in the technical space... I wish we had a streaming service dictator to solve the Chromecast problem from the other direction).