Ask HN: Why are streaming apps so bad (insiders only)?
A sincere question to the many actual & former employees on this forum. And before you get suspicious, yes I understand TVs are underpowered. There are still great streaming apps which perform adequately.
Horrendous quality issues I've seen:
* Deliberately not reusing rendered Activities (e.g. hitting the back button re-draws and re-requests content with painful latency).
* Not cleaning up Ads resources when the ad terminates, so playback drops frames and audio
* Not minding viewed ads, so viewers are punished with duplicate ads plays if they close or skip by accident (Netflix is mindful of this)
* exhausting massive memory -- clear memory leaks and waste
* humiliating UIs for search , playback , scrubbing , etc
* audio/video streams out of sync (e.g. Hulu trailers)
Sure teams are time and budget constrained I get that. But I'm curious about actual stories of corner cutting leading to such painful UIs. It's especially bizarre given that people pay a monthly subscription, so c-sat is rather important.
Known violators are : Kanopy (which bills Public Libraries a hefty subscription), Peacock , HboMax and nearly every other streaming app.
Netflix and Amazon prime are better about performance.
> given that people pay a monthly subscription, so c-sat is rather important.
You are missing a key aspect of what is going on. People buy streaming services based on the content, not the app. People will complain about the app, put bad reviews up, and still pay their monthly fee, which is better for the business than having zero tech complaints and cancelling because the content sucks.
in general yes, but there is still lost opportunity.
This is true for nearly any business until the scales tip in the other direction.
"People come to mcdonalds for the burgers not the bathrooms" until eventually enough pain points (bathrooms, service, punctuality, traffic etc) make them stop coming
> Not minding viewed ads, so viewers are punished with duplicate ads plays if they close or skip by accident (Netflix is mindful of this)
The Roku Channel used to be really bad at this; I had a bad experience over a year ago and avoided it until recently as they carry a show I was watching that left another platform in the past couple months and it's good at this now.
Of course, it still has the basic issues that make me skip back after ad breaks frequently. a) they consistently insert ads slightly offset of the intended insertion points; b) the ad has different audio/video/hdcp properties than the content its inserted into, so my receiver (and sometimes my tv) blanks audio to resync when the content resumes.
I'm not thrilled that Amazon added ads into their streaming product, but at least the insertions are well timed and I don't recall audio dropouts when content is resumed (but maybe I missed it).
that reminds me of how Hulu struggles playing trailers. it takes 30 seconds for the audio and video streams to sync up
It’s kind of obvious.
Netflix has co-CEOs. One for tech and one for content. They value both equally
Amazon is a tech company and pays their software developers tech company wages.
The rest are media businesses. HBOMax specifically are owned by Discovery who has always been interested in doing things as cheaply as possible.
While Disney/Hulu are also on the surface media companies. Disney bought BamTech who had the best streaming technology/people outside of Netflix and Disney has always cared about technology
But why for everything that is holy are you watching the ad tier of streaming services?
i agree with the high level (budget, corner cutting), but I'm curious about deliberate decisions to build things so awfully. some of these decisions take more work to do wrong than right (android keeps activities resident, for example -- unloading ads layers is trivial)
they are black friday deals where you get a year for $30
I am sure there are also deals where I can get a monthly anal probe with a cactus. I won’t be doing that either. Actually it’s a toss up as far as which one is worse.
netflix ads tier was very usable for the first month, then the ads became suffocating.
all the other ads tiers are pretty painful. but none are as bad as broadcast TV.
I don't watch streaming a lot, and the Ads tiers are a great way to use the service for a month or two until I tire.
The last time I watched broadcast TV, I had a DirectTV box with first TiVo and later their own pretty good DVR. I think I had my first DirectTivo in 2003. It’s been over two decades since I sat through commercials regularly outside of the occasional big event sports as social gatherings or award shows we watch live to discuss with friends on social media
they can be a welcome break. if you mute the ads, they are hardly distracting. good time to check the phone, get a snack etc.
The ads are repetitive usually drugs or snacks so they are easy to tune out.
Not an insider, but it is probably because those technical don’t matter much to many users.
Content is mostly what matters.
The app store reviews reveal that consumers do care about performance, even the non technical ones.
What do revenues reveal?
revenues don't reveal anything because they are the sum of thousands of noisy vectors. that's why surveys, reviews, customer studies, NPS etc are all done to try to figure out retention.