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.
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.
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!)
Do you have the old black remote that looks like a small elongated trackpad? The newer gray remote with the 4k Apple TV is excellent.
Finally, if you want to jump a few seconds instantly, like if you just missed a few lines of dialogue, the thing to do is to physically press down the left or right directional pad (the edges of the circle) while praying to the touchpad gods that you don't accidentally quiver by 0.2mm and be detected as a swipe which will do the wrong thing.
Of course, it's proof of Apple's poor usability that literally anyone reading this who owns the device doesn't already know how to do all three of those functions. But we're still at the peak of the fad of 'minimalism' instead of putting dedicated buttons for each of these in an ergonomic arrangement and printing labels on them.
True, but that is why this is a hard engineering challenge -- there are a lot of variations on client-side devices which need to be supported well. Upgrade cycles for TVs is 3x that of phones, is my guess.
Things like throttling by IP Address which used to be a viable option is not effective anymore.
If an attack or abuse comes from a CG-NAT address they have to throttle the IP and all the customers behind it.
Cutesy error pages are cute exactly once, then they're even worse than a minimally viable error page.
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.
But acceptable quality can definitely go smaller. Especially if "acceptable" is judged by the significant compression artifacts I see on actual cable TV all the time.
Netflix 4K is some bs in my experience. A 4K file of the same show, pirated, is vastly better quality. Whatever they do to it is just vandalism.
Focusing on resolution is like asking "how strong is one meter of rope" without talking about the composition of the rope.
With streaming video, image quality ultimately comes down to the codec and the bitrate. They probably use a relatively low bitrate regardless of codec.
Amazon Prime 4K HDR on the other hand looks like garbage on every platform I've used -- the compression is unbearable in any dark scene.
Netflix: 15-18 Mbps Disney+: 25-30 Mbps Amazon Prime Video: 15-18 Mbps Apple TV+: 25-40 Mbps HBO Max: 15-20 Mbps
This is from an LLM but it tallies with what I remember reading. Apple TV is by far the best, followed by Disney+.
Netflix unfortunately seem to use any improvement in compression encoding efficiency to reduce bitrates, rather than improve PQ at the same bitrate. It's definitely got worse over time. I also remember reading that for content they deem more compressible they use a lower bitrate.
I can sort of get that on the lower plans, but its frustrating they won't improve PQ (or at least keep it the same) for the (expensive) 4K plan.
Video player controls have been a solved problem for something like several decades. It's actually impressive that they managed to screw it up so badly.
(Not defending it; I’m just saying it compares favorably with whatever crap is in most non-pirate apps.)
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.
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.
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.
What they really should do is license their content to netflix for a fair price and just let netflix be the service people use.
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.
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.
Because they previous had a lot of that content before those providers pulled it and created competing systems.
Apple and Amazon Prime and Youtube seem to enable other services via their platforms, presumably for a cut. If the cut is large enough, seems like a good business move for Netflix also -- let the content owners focus on their business rather than some random broadcasting company trying to hire AWS infrastructure engineers and 3rd party platform testing experts.
I agree that eg Disney+ is a bit rougher around the edges.
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.
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.
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.