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Comment by randycupertino | Hacker News Reader

> On one end, you have Netflix practically leading the field with the best of the best engineers and practices.

I don't really think users will care at all about this, though. They just want high quality content. The users and the their dollars will flock to the high quality content.

Netflix is feeling like H&M "fast fashion" where they churn out a bazillion low quality shows to throw everything against the wall and hope something sticks to keep people subscribing.

Meanwhile the entire field is getting diluted by other platforms popping up and customers are getting fatigued enough to pay for premium content only (HBO/Disney/ESPN) and then pirate everything else, imo.

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I think the technical quality does matter though. Everyday people may not care about how "cool" the Netflix engineering is, but they certainly care about the end product.

For example, over the holidays I watched 3 different streaming platforms:

BBC iPlayer - occasionally cut out and dropped back to main menu requiring me to find the program again.

Amazon Prime - often had buffering problems requiring me to manually lower resolution (on a 150Mb/s connection...)

Netflix - No problems, hit start on a movie and watch it to the end.

This kind of thing does get remembered; I certainly ended up watching a heck of a lot more Netflix than any other platform.

Quality content is important, and lack of it is a reason to quit a service for sure.

I haven't had any issues with the service of Disney+, so they're at least doing good enough (on my devices, on my home network).

On the other side of the spectrum, Apple TV on my devices takes about 8 attempts to start a stream, including a reboot. They would have to have a big exclusive that I really wanted to see for me to use that again.

Smallish differences in how long it takes to get a stream started (including browse/search time) probably drive long term behavior, when content quality is similar enough though; because I'll tend to use the service that gets me into watching something I'll enjoy sooner; and when the same content is available on multiple services, I use the one that's faster to get started.

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