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Comment by iammiles | Hacker News Reader

…let's say, your TV, or your iOS device will just do 10 network calls to these different microservices. It will just not scale at all. You would have a very bad customer experience. It would feel like using the Disney app. It's just not ideal.

That’s some shade.

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Lol the Disney+ app UX is honestly terrible. Not to mention the regular app crashes on apple devices.

Disney has _how_ much money to spend on their streaming services technology stack and they just... don't?

Just feels like they'll piss on the customerwhen given the chance because people will still pay for that sweet Disney juice regardless.

What I find funny is that with that kind of money you could staff 10 app teams, develop the app 10 times in different ways and just pick the best one in the end.

Who picks? Likely that is the real problem.

I've worked in streaming before and something many don't realize is there are 10-15 different app platforms you need to build for (web, ios, android, roku, android tv, tvos, fire tv, xbox, playstation, etc, etc). So 10 app teams only get you ONE app across all of the platforms.

I don't think the experience is that much different between the different services, honestly. I vaguely have some recollection of Max being a bit bad, but don't remember the details. They are all fine.

Except for YouTube, that's just leagues ahead of everything else.

the tvos app for youtube is pretty bad

What problems are you experiencing?

Nah the Disney app is really poor, it crashes / refuses to load way more than the other ones in my experience. On multiple different devices / networks.

This adds absolutely nothing to the conversation, but the Disney app on LG tvs are rock solid

YouTube is the only thing I've ever interacted with where I can hear the audio of videos that I shouldn't be able to hear. And I've had times where two were playing at once overlapping eachother.

It only happens a few times per year for me, but I've never had it happen on another service.

Small price to pay for videos that load almost instantly. It's certainly faster than my Jellyfin setup despite Jellyfin's massive home field advantage (SSDs and 0ms LAN latency)

I don't feel that's true.

For example, Disney is actually pretty terrible compared to Netflix + Prime. Worst part of the service is when it frequently loses where you were in a program. They also made it really hard to get to 'continue watching' for a long time.

Another one that has annoying UX issues is BBC iPlayer. If you click on the latest episode of a show that you're watching in 'popular', it won't resume where you were in the episodes, it will play that episode. Very frustrating. While technically correct, that's not what most people want to happen.

I do find most are very similar.

The service type is a bit different, but IMO Peacock is the worst. None of the others are as consistently slow for me.

One of my peeves on Disney+ on Roku, is scrolling down to ~third row for Continue Watching, takes another 3 seconds to load that list while I stare at the silhouette thumbnails or whatever. I can (barely) understand that they want to advertise their new content prominently above, but it’s just sloppy to make such a common flow (continue watching) feel so slow and irritating.

My peeve with Roku is that the Roku Express' processor is too slow for a smooth UI experience. It's always a few button presses behind.

You shouldn't have to buy the more expensive Roku 4K just to have a device powerful enough to run its own interface smoothly. Granted it's only $10 more but had I known the UI was sluggish I would have paid it from the start even though I don't need 4K. But now I've bought both.

Disney app works really well for me (Android).

But now I'm gonna hear the comment every time I wait for it to load :P

Would hit a whole lot better if the Netflix app wasn't equally as bad as the Disney+ one....

This seems really immature as well.

Focus on your own house. At the end of the day both Disney and Hulu work more than fine for me( I'm guessing it's the same team ).

Netflix had what, a decade head start. I'd expect them to of perfected streaming.

I don't consider making many network calls necessarily bad for experience. My https://hackerer.news page load makes more requests than I care to count and it runs for 70 seconds (looking at the 'date:'s in the network tab). But the page renders very quickly. It might be bad if you're in AU/NZ idk, but all the requests are cached via CloudFlare and being individual units is highly cacheable which probably offsets a lot of other downsides.

Based on my own experience its just frank observation

I'm interviewing at Disney Streaming, lol

Fix it!

And then quit. Reason: My work is done here.

There is a bug in the Roku app where if you close it and then re-open quickly it will hang on the profile login screen every, single time. Have to go back to Home again and re-open the app.

Seems dumb, but I have 2 little kids and they both like to "pause" whatever show when it's time to turn the tv off. So after the first one does it, I have to do this dumb little dance to get the app to load again so the second one can do it.

> they both like to "pause"

My son also want to do this. Pause. Then turn the TV off. Maybe they believe the show will keep running with the TV off unless paused?

I have sometimes opened YouTube on my Roku to find it skipped part of a video I was watching, maybe because the Roku took time to close down after I turned off the TV by IR.

Better safe than sorry. ^S

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