Netflix ditches Webkit to roll out new UI for smart TVs, Roku boxes, consoles | Hacker News Reader

Netflix ditches Webkit to roll out new UI for smart TVs, Roku boxes, consoles

gigaom.com

43 pointsdkasper58 comments

I think the same pattern is repeating over and over again, a company uses something like HTML 5 to get traction cheaply on multiple platforms, then when they want to provide a better user experience, they go some kind of native to provide more/better features on specific platforms.

It seems like an entirely pragmatic approach.

I'm still amazed how much effort is laid on the UX for consoles, while the browser version needs some urgent attention.

Why? Most people watch Netflix content on a television through a console or a set-top box. It makes complete sense to concentrate resources developing the experience for those markets rather than the browser. On tablets and phones people will use the app. I'd guess that the number of people looking at Netflix content in a browser is probably in the low single digit percentile range.

You'd be forgetting about the college kid with a laptop segment.

which i don't believe is a very high value segment - college and money don't mix very well imho.

No I'm not. Netflix has about 40 million subscribers. 5% of them ('low single digit percentile') would still be 2 million - easily enough to account for college students, people who travel a lot, children, etc once you discount those who have tablets.

There are 21 million college students in the US. 10% having Netflix accounts isn't completely out of the question, but it'd be a very impressive level of market penetration.

Anecdotally, when I was in college, no one paid for their own account, they just used their parent's.

Among Netflix users, 48% watch on a computer screen (up from 44% last year); 23% watch on a smartphone (up from 11%); 15% watch on their iPad, way up from 5% last year. But the percentage of users who reported using Roku or Nintendo's Wii game console dropped this year.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2013/09/18/netflix-hul...

With Silverlight and Flash dying there is no longer a good platform on the web for their kind of experience. They might just wait 5 years until HTML5 is finally good enough.

It's good enough now. They just have to give up on DRM.

No, proper DRM support is what will make it good.

How exactly do users benefit from DRM?

It allows them to access content that they otherwise couldn't.

Isn't it the bad effect of DRM rather than a benefit!

DRM is only a hinderance to legit users. Pirates are pirates and DRM isn't something they deal with.

Uh, no. That's some impressive exec-level doublethink.

Content is open by default.

DRM is a method by which you prevent people from accessing content.

How so? This guy has a show he won't let me use unless I agree to try and control access. My choices are access with stupid crap like DRM or no access. Sure a third option like free access to everyone everywhere would be great, but that guy won't go for it. Until we can talk that guy in to going for it DRM increases access. Sure it doesn't grant maximal access but access is greater than it is without DRM.

Then "this guy" you mention is ignorant of how technology and piracy work and any rational person should push back.

DRM is not "necessary" by any possible meaning of the word. It's forced upon people by the ignorant.

Necessary in the way that a drivers license and car insurance are necessary to drive.

There is a legitimate need to ensure that people who drive both know how to do so safely and can handle any accidents financially.

There is no legitimate need to hamper fair use in the way that DRM does, especially considering that it fails at its goals.

I have yet to see a single use-case where DRM has improved my experience. Like most people, I have seen countless cases where DRM has significantly degraded it.

Your statement is in dire need of things to back it up.

Netflix and Steam haven't improved your experience? Their very existence depends on DRM.

Phonographs and music CD's don't have DRM, yet they exist, and have been very profitable for studios. If DRM had never been invented, we would still probably have DVD's (whose DRM is so broken it may as well not exist) and Netflix.

The discussion isn't "what exists", but rather "does DRM'd things improve the experience of the thing". Yes, there are DRM-free versions of things, or broken-DRM versions. Gog.com is a competitor to Steam that deals in DRM-free games, but their catalog isn't nearly as extensive because many studios won't put their games out there DRM-free. Steam freed us from CDs and DVDs that can get broken or lost, and freed us from typing in CD keys. That minor improvement was enough to make stores all but stop selling PC games.

The question is, does Netflix streaming have a better experience than DVDs? I argue yes (as evidenced by the fact that Blockbuster is out of business and Netflix is booming). CDs don't have DRM but Spotify does. People use Spotify because it's more convenient. People don't use it because of the DRM, but studios are willing to trust it because it has DRM.

The point I'm arguing against is "DRM has never improved the experience". I point to two things that exist because of DRM that are arguably more convenient and have a better UX than the DRM-free or broken-DRM versions.

I see you're getting downvoted, and I honestly think you've missed the point, but at least I'll give you a quick reply.

> The point I'm arguing against is "DRM has never improved the experience". I point to two things that exist because of DRM

You point to digital media. Digital media has existed as long as digital media has existed. DRM is a much newer thing. It has done nothing to enhance digital media, except restrict its ability to be enjoyed.

That some short-sighted dinosaurs insist that they must have DRM to release digital media does in no way mean DRM improves or provides the experience of digital media. It just means that some people want to reduce the experience of something which was working fine in the first place as a prerequisite to ship.

That's their decision and their call to make, but they have been proven wrong about that in the past and will be proven wrong again.

What you say it true, but that's missing my point. Yes, I understand that DVDs and CDs and records and tapes have been around forever. But Netflix hasn't. Steam hasn't. They only became viable (in the studio's eyes) when DRM became possible. Digital distribution could have been done for a long time. It wasn't (officially) until there was some method of controlling it.

That's the entirety of my point. DRM doesn't make digital media possible, it makes studios accepting of digital distribution, which is an improvement on user experience.

Their very existence depends upon the continued good will of Big Content. DRM could disappear tomorrow and Netflix (not to mention thousands of other sites) would be better for it.

Well, except that without DRM you wouldn't have the content to watch in the first place. Legally that is. As long as DRM is a requirement for copyrighted content you will have DRM.

It generally feels like a rich document that was hacked to be interactive enough to resemble a GUI.

It's barely acceptable even if they didn't need drm. You'd want HLS or some other adaptive bitrate switching technology as well as consistent support for H.264 video.

Also it's not Netflix's choice the studios hoist DRM on them. Unless your solution is dropping the cast majority of their library in order to support the video tag.

Unfortunately, with EME in Chrome OS, content owners won't have to give up on DRM any time soon for Netflix to switch to HTML5.

(On ARM-based Chromebooks, Netflix already uses an HTML5 interface.)

Silverlight is such a waste of resources and a pox of vulnerabilities. Flash is bad, Silverlight is worse and the sooner services everyone uses stop using them the better.

Yet it had a superior GUI mark-up language and supported more than one back-end language (C#, VB, F# to begin with).

Ok, so web browsers that use Webkit will still be supported. "Ditches Webkit" means Netflix no longer bundles Webkit in their non-browser clients.

Isn't that what the title says? Or did it change?

I don't believe the title has changed, its just the way I interpreted it upon first reading lead me to make that (hopefully) clarifying comment.

It read to me that Netflix is stopping Webkit support entirely, which I realise is nonsense.

The title has changed, it used to read: "Netflix ditches Webkit and HTML5 to roll out new UI"

Which seems to imply they ditched it entirely.

I initially took this as a condemnation of HTML5 as a common runtime, but it looks to be more a condemnation of "shipping webkit yourself to get an HTML5 common runtime"

I'd love to know more about what they're doing on platforms that have webviews.

Will the Apple TV App be updated, too, or is it completely separate from the other implementations?

It will likely stay the same. I can't see what in the Apple TV app would use WebKit since it uses the exact same controls as the rest of the Apple TV. And honestly, I hope it stays the same because I think the ATV app is so much better than the Xbox/PS3/iPad apps... It's simple, doesn't bother me by autoplaying the next episode etc.

> It's simple, doesn't bother me by autoplaying the next episode etc.

Amusing since that's generally the biggest complaint about the AppleTV version vs. the others.

That's my complaint on Roku as well. When I'm doing housework, I like to have the TV on in the background. Having to stop every 22 minutes to play the next episode breaks my flow.

The AppleTV app doesn't use webkit; it's the standard, very limited AppleTV UI kit. This is why it's less terrible than most Netflix clients; less rope to hang themselves.

They did manage to make it slightly awful within the constraints of the model, though; see the mechanism used for moving between seasons of a TV show.

Here's am article on the Apple TV UI framework. It's called Back Row

Whoops! Forgot the actual link. Shouldn't be commenting when I'm half asleep I guess

http://nshipster.com/backrow/

That and the size 10 pixel font they use for everything.

No.

The Apple TV will keep its current look and feature set

http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/13/5098224/netflix-introduce...

Thank goodness. That autoplay an episode after the last one ends that is on the web client and 360 client is truly awful. The lack of that "feature" is part of why I bought a second AppleTV.

That article doesn't have much details on what the new UI is based on... does anyone know?

This is interesting to me personally as Netflix had contacted me to potentially work there specifically on the WebKit engine and apps roughly 18 months ago. That is, at the same time they were already making it obsolete. I wonder if it was secret even within the organization.

Although the older Roku's are not initial targets for deployment, the timing nonetheless seems to roughly correspond with when my Roku XD started rebooting every hour or two while playing Netflix.

If there's some correspondence on the back end, I hope Netflix will sort it out, as the reboot takes a good couple of minutes; additionally, the glitch strikes suddenly and hard enough that the current location in the playing stream is not saved.

There was something minimalist and efficient about the old design - lots of information in front of the viewer, easy to pan across 100 movies quickly.

Now, two rows, lots of bandwidth used to update the ad frame dominating half the screen. Its slick and showy and ... less useful for browsing movie titles?

On a related note, the BBC has an open source library for building HTML apps on TV called the TV Application Layer (TAL) which looks very promising:

http://fmtvp.github.io/tal/

They should forget about all that and spend the money on MORE CONTENT. I don't give a shit about the UI, I want something worth watching. I don't go to Netflix to ooh and ahh over the pretty UI.

spending money making current customers happy with a better experience is never wasted

if their current UI sucked you'd be complaining about having trouble finding a movie -- which you kind of are doing already. IMO one of Netflix's major problems is the UI, when i'm on my PS3 and looking for something to watch, there are 75 movies from different subsets (most of which are unrated by me - promoting me to watch something i haven't seen) - the problem with this is i often like to watch things i have already seen (hence the reason i buy a dvd). That content isn't readily available or easy to search unless i remember or already know what i want.

I doubt my two year plasma will get the update

I thought that Netflix required Microsoft Silverlight to play?

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