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Comment by notfried | Hacker News Reader

Netflix Engineering is probably far ahead of any other competitor streaming service, but I wonder how much the ROI is on that effort and cost. As a user, I don’t see much difference in reliability between Netflix, Disney, HBO, Hulu, Peacock and Paramount+. They all error out every now and then. Maybe 5-10 years ago you needed to be much more sophisticated because of lower bandwidth and less mature tech. Ultimately, the only real difference that makes me go for one service over the other is the content.

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All the money they spend still fails at basic UX, creating a finely crafted, polished turd of engineering perfection. I don't see the Netflix experience to be superior in any way to the other big services; they all have their own issues that engineering haven't solved properly, most likely some different ones.

An example (in this case ONE PIECE on Netflix Japan region): My Netflix language is set to English, but I am not in an English speaking country. And yet, all shows have an English description and title, as well as episode lists with descriptions also in English. And yet, the program itself is not in English, nor does it have English audio options or subtitles. And the UI does not indicate if there are English subtitles until I play an episode and open the subtitles menu. This is compounded to be even worse when there are so many shows that are only half subtitled (different rights holders I assume). Why does the UI lie to me by showing everything about the series/movie in my native language except the actual content itself? This is really common in non-English speaking regions, and it looks like a basic engineering failure of looking up their global database content in MY language while ignoring whether the actual CONTENT is available in my language. I suppose this could be a UX issue, but it also looks like an engineering one to me. And aren't those intertwined to some extent anyway?

I agree with your example and that this functionality sucks. However it cannot be an engineering issue as it must be technically very easy to implement in a better way. It must be a product/UX/marketing kind of decision behind it or just plain ignorance.

This. There's no technical limitations behind offering an A-Z catalog experience, it's all decided by that VP of user experience who wants to squeeze the most amount of screen / device time out of each user

Am I really alone to notice that each year, our collective UX across consumer (SaaS) software gets worse?

Netflix has far better UI/UX and features than it's competitors. I'm sure your specific issue is a legit one, but Netflix as a whole is much better

I don't know if Netflix has caught up recently, but during the pandemic times Disney+'s group viewing was a very good feature with good UX, and I haven't seen anything like it on other services

Netflix Party launched in March 2020 for that purpose.

I worked at HBO Max when it launched. Less than 300 engineers, backend services written in either Node or Go. Mostly plain REST calls between services, fancier stuff was only used when there was a performance bottleneck.

The engineering was very thoughtful and the internal tooling was really good.

One underappreciated aspect of simply engineered systems is that they are simple to think about, simple to scale up, and simple to debug when something goes wrong.

And one of the underestimated aspects is that all the best engineers won't make you a good product. They will produce the best architecture and probably constant refactoring, but they will fail to deliver [things the user care about/can see].

I notice their front-end engineering (and design). The app experience has always been noticeably better than every other streaming service, which matters to me

It's also possible that savings on infrastructure costs, reduced engineering hours spent on debugging, etc give them a quiet competitive advantage

Most engineering is not visible to the end-user

Their front end is just plain garbage. It does everything besides helping discovery of content. And people look up to Netflix like it's some miracle thing.

It is well engineered and meticulously manicured garbage though. In your example, the harder it is to discover content the easier it is to realize there is nothing new to watch. (Hence the rotating thumbnails, for a trivial example)

One thing I hate about netflix that category recommendation also include other category stuff like Trending/Recently watched etc I just want to watch some classical movies so plz show me your whole catalog of such movies I don't use netflix often so this issue is more prominent for me atleast since I am not used to the UI bloat

There is always a lot of good things to watch, but you have to dance around the idiotic recommendation system to find the hidden pearls. I'm sure there are a lot of good, talented people working there, but for what, when the frontend team kneecaps their work with the abysmal user interface.

And the best part... you chat with the support and they try to force a how to use our webpage shit on you when you want to report an annoying UI issue. It's really mind boggling how a congregation of idiots with their heads up their asses runs that place.

That you don't like how you have to use the Netflix interface has nothing to do with how it's engineered.

Lately, the user experience has gotten much worse for Windows users: In July they removed the ability to download content for offline viewing. So everyone who wants to watch content while travelling, for example, has no other option but to use a competitor like Prime Video.

I would also like to point out that those "savings on infrastructure costs" seemingly do not benefit their users: They have repeatedly increased prices over the past few years.

I'm also unsure whether they are using their competitive advantage properly. Anecdotally, it used to be that almost everyone I knew was only streaming on Netflix. These days, the streaming services that people use seem much more diverse.

All of the services you mention have large engineering/ops teams and similar monitoring systems in place. Their is absolutely an ROI on spending on reliability.

Not an expert by any means but streaming HQ video is pretty expensive (even more so for live content), seems like the only providers that can do so profitably are YouTube and Netflix. I'm sure a big reason for that is the engineering (esp. CDN)

This is actually not true nowadays. Streaming HQ video is pretty cheap (check out per GB pricing from Cloudfront or Fastly and divide that by 5-10 to get a realistic number)

The value of netflix is probably not only on its technical prowess and app experience, but it seems they are pretty involved in content direction through metrics. ¹ ²

Sources:

[1] https://youtu.be/xL58d1l-6tA

[2] https://youtu.be/uFpK_r-jEXg

Jury’s out on their content direction. They cancel great shows before the first season has even had a chance to permeate. It’s clear they have little interest in long term artistic investments.

It also shows that they have no interest in building a library of quality content. They could invest in shows that have proper endings but instead they pollute their library with unfinished works that are certain to either be avoided by netflix customers who know that the show was canceled before it concluded, or piss off any netflix customer who doesn't.

Netflix doesn't care though because they just want people watching the newest thing they shovel at us. They go out of their way to hide a lot of older content from users to keep people's attention on the new stuff. Half of the categories they show you are just new ways to show you the latest things they're pushing (recently added, trending, top 10, new on netflix, your next watch, top picks for you, we think you'll love these, etc.) and every other category just repeats the same shows.

Who cares if some show leaves you disappointed because it got you hooked but then was canceled after 3 weeks, Netflix will just push some other newer show to keep you watching until they cancel that too.

I’ve thought this for a while, and it’s sad because I want to reward good tech. I usually think about this while I’m waiting for paramount to load for the third time because picture in picture has gone black again when I tried to full screen .

Although, I agree with the general point, I am thankful for the bit of extra work they do when I travel abroad. The quality and availability of Netflix is far superior (many don't even work outside the US).

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