Making Netflix.com Faster
techblog.netflix.com
techblog.netflix.com
If they offer internet services at netflix prices and are highly successful (lots of signups) - if this allows a small fraction of their cable customers to cut ties, Comcast loses money.
In music it almost buys you every song, ever.
I would also say the market is a determining factor in the decision to make it eight a month.
Studios don't see Netflix as fair value no matter what they offer if they think they can go do it themselves. As if the market will support dozens of independent content channels at eight to fifteen dollars a month each. People are wanting to get away from cable, not find a way to recreate it.
I'm sure Netflix would be willing to bump up the price if they could get the content and the market would pay it. I have a feeling many studios would still say no as they explore their own options.
>People are wanting to get away from cable, not find a way to recreate it.
But it's totally unreasonable to believe you'll get the same content as cable at a steep reduction in price. Sure you can take away cable profits and delivery expense, but you have to add in Netflix profit and delivery expense. It'll be cheaper, but not by a lot. Unless Netflix increases the subscriber base, but cable and networks already had a massive marketshare.
The value Netflix provides on 8 dollars is miraculous. But most of that pricing is hinged on netflix being a rerun service. Studios sell them stuff that is old and will never run on TV again. Netflix is sort of a parasite on cable and the movie industry.
If netflix actually kills cable and broadcast TV, then who is going to make all the shows for it?
As netflix becomes the normal way to consume media the expense of the content is going to shoot up. Because media is priced based on price discrimination. If netflix becomes the premium market, it'll have to pay premium prices.
It is not totally unreasonable to expect Netflix, and similar services, to replace cable, because most of the content that cable provides these days is total rubbish. I've been a cable cutter for over five years now and every time I visit someone who has cable I scan the stations wondering why they pay so much for all that crap. Netflix has a lot of crap as well, but I don't pay $150 a month for it.
Although Netflix does offer a great deal of content that is considered old, but so does cable. A number of stations, that are not the traditional broadcast networks, features old content and a good number of stations that produce new content simple repeat it nonstop to fill in time.
I don't believe Netflix will necessarily kill cable by itself and broadcast is making a slow comeback. Although broadcast is still niche these days, much like vinyl. But as for content? I seriously doubt there will be a lack of new content in the new wild world of no cable TV. Especially since most of the content on cable today is not created by cable companies, just broadcasted by them. There's no reason any number of content creators couldn't make a deal with Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, or any future content broadcast method to show their stuff. They do it with Hulu now, which is how I watch my new content instead of waiting for it to show up elsewhere. Netflix has several deals with content creators now.
We no longer live in the world where someone with lots of capital is required to get a project started. There are several examples of people on low budgets making good content. Premium content will always have a premium cost, but that isn't necessarily just because of the cost of production. There are numerous reasons why one show would cost more than another show, not just the cost of creating the content in of itself.
But especially in TV series, there's a lot more competition than there used to be, and so prices are being driven way up. And Netflix is devoting more of their budget to original programming as well.
There's probably very little due to studio nefariousness. The studios largely want to get paid, and creators being able to choose which studios to work with is a pretty big factor in keeping them mostly honest. It's like how TV studios are willing to sell shows to other networks if they'll make a better offer than the network under the same parent umbrella -- the studio has its own bottom line and future prospects to worry about.
Netflix rotates their streaming content in an attempt to make old content look new. A series or movie will disappear for a year or two only to re-appear as though it's something brand new to the Netflix lineup, rather than a case of Netflix shuffling great chunks of content in and out of play.
I don't mind them doing that, I can understand the improbability of supporting their entire streaming library at once, just from a management perspective.
The studios do give netflix grief. It'll be interesting to see how this works out. I can't foresee any future where each of the big studios can support any ~10 a month model to show only their content. Maybe a dollar or two. But definitely no more, and it would have to be commercial-free.
There will have to be an aggregate distrubtor, whether it's NetFlix or another company, or maybe just devices to access studio's streaming channels (Roku, etc.). I don't see each studio being able to maintain the revenue to make the required streaming infrastructure cost effective.
But now I treat it more like a really cheap version of cable TV. With cable, I can turn it on at any given time and channel surf until I find something I wouldn't mind watching. The specific movie or show I want to see probably won't be on but sometimes it is and the rest of the time, I'd just flip until I found something interesting.
The thing is, just a basic cable package for casual browsing and watching shows costs at least like $30-50/mo and often more. Netflix is what, $10/mo? As a replacement for "all the random channels" I find it to be quite good. I usually have a better time finding something I'd enjoy watching compared to basic cable and it costs a good deal less. For the occasional movie or newer show, there are online purchases, rentals, and more "premium" services like HBO Now. Just like cable TV, you pay extra for the new stuff.
The only thing about the new Netflix website that bums me out is that it broke the "God Mode" bookmarklet that I always used. It got rid of the endless horizontal scrolling and showed several rows of titles for each category, making for much easier and faster browsing.
I have a NowTV subscription which costs roughly the same and there's loads more things to choose from. I also have Amazon Prime (which I accidentally ended up with because I forgot to cancel the trial). It's problem is that I find the UI a complete disaster (and how I wish they'd release a Roku version in the UK)
This is exactly the entire point of the UI changes. They just don't want to admit it (obviously).
I see the lack of titles complaint all the time but personally I just don't find this to be true. There are tons of titles of all quality levels and genres coming and going all the time on netflix. I've made great discoveries there for new content, foreign films and tv shows, independent titles, etc. It just takes a little digging. And there are a great many sites on the internet that will tell you what is coming and leaving netflix in any given month along with making recommendations.
The main thing that affects the titles you are shown by default are your ratings. You don't even have to watch a movie to rate it. But the rating will still be used to determine what they list by default. If you watch and never rate, the algo will make worse choices. I pretty quickly eliminated straight to tv shlock by giving 1 star ratings to that type of content.
In all seriousness though, have you contacted Netflix support? They have seemed really responsive in the past.
Uhm, that's a wrong way to think about it. The same code can't run in a two different environments. If it does then it means that the environment is the same! The question then becomes what is an 'environment'.
Once you start explicitly tracking what the dependencies of your code are, in terms of language/runtime support, external libraries etc, it becomes very clear what the 'environment' is (though JavaScript as a language is exceptionally bad at expressing these dependencies). If your code runs in Node.js and latest Chrome, then the 'environment' is ES5 or even ES6. If it also runs in IE7, then the environment likely is ES3. If your code also needs access to the DOM and WebWorker APIs, as well as underscore, then the environment is ES3+DOM+WebWorker+underscore.
If only we had support in the language and/or tooling around it to express these dependencies and warn us if we try to use some code in an environment that is unsuitable for it...
It's like saying "We run an equals to architecture".
In the context of JavaScript, Isomorphic means "runs on the client and server".
Here's an article from 2011 that uses the word in this way, and includes a definition: http://blog.nodejitsu.com/scaling-isomorphic-javascript-code...
The fact that isomorphic means something else in a different context seems irrelevant to me.
I did 5 mins of googling and found the following mathematical terms also have different meanings when used in a software engineering or computing context:
* integration
* kernel
* product
* scalar
* module
* functionI've been doing this for a while, after being sick of all those poor quality JavaScript frameworks and it works perfectly fine.
Usually the "main" JavaScript framework code is bloated, but kind of working, but as soon as you need some add-on or extension you are entering bug hell.
I'll just write the code in Scala, and have the assurance that it works without having to deal with unmaintained, bug-filled JavaScript libraries.
My server code is running Scala on the JVM on the server, which is JITted down with all the magic of the JVM into native, and running full steam.
My client code is cross compiled javascript that the browser does it's thing client side.
The magic is:
1) Both parts are the same codebase, I can share data objects and logic between platforms
2) I get actual static typing on everything. Not some kind of fake static typing like coffeescript. So just the fact that my code compiles makes my code roughly equal to a mess of Javascript with a bunch of tests hitting the happy path.
3) I get to write in an actual decent language, not Javasript, the worse language to ever write in.
Javascript is the new assembly. It's great, but I never want to touch it! If I can touch a higher level language, why wouldn't I?
EDIT: Forgot about this at the top:
"The impact of this effort netted a 70% reduction in startup time" -- So is this the same metric?
Apologies for not making this more clear in the post. The 70% reduction is for time to interactive (tti).
What about a cross platform libnetflix and let us build our own native apps? (Like spotify do.) Or even allow integration into e.g. Kodi media centre.
On the first episode in the 'chain' the cursor disappears after a few seconds of inactivity, but for all subsequent episodes it does not- very odd. You have to refresh the page to reload everything to make it start disappearing again!
EDIT: OK. I guess this is the right place so, my son's XBox hangs when switching between game playing and watching Netflix. Does anyone know how to fix that?
quote"Without shared rendering logic we couldn't have realized the potential of rendering only what was necessary on startup and everything else as data became available."
And these days ES6/ES7 makes Javascript very palatable indeed. Check it out :-)
You have one 'Universal Application', and then you have two small entry points: - server.js is a small (express) server to send a HTTP response to the client (server bootstrapping) - client.js renders a page and the mounts it onto a DOM node.
To get around the issues of database access, it makes it a lot easier to put all of that into an API that can be accessed by the server and the client.
Here's a very small project I build (and am continuing to build) to learn about this architecture https://github.com/joshhunt/reactapus
Your project looks like it will be a very helpful resource for learning. Thanks for the link.
You can still use authentication with an API... You don't need direct access to the database to do that.
Even better to see these techniques applied appropriately, instead of slathered on to the point of being detrimental.
Also, +1 for using jQuery and being proud of it! :)
I use jQuery and am proud of it, but it looks like that may no longer be the case at Netflix?
That wasn't the takeaway some of us read here, and honestly, that's just foolish. Take pride in your craftsmanship, never take pride in your tools. I love my hammer, but when I need a screwdriver, it's a stupid choice.