bobdvb

Given that the piracy charges can be fined as low as €50, it can be discussed proportionately.

I totally agree that the AI companies should be accountable for their intellectual property leaching.

In Greece the bars are closed during voting to 1) Keep people sober. 2) Avoid politicians buying people drinks for votes on the day.

That's like saying "The Great Wall of China is just like any other garden wall."

Every time you make a decision which increases the needed bandwidth, or device performance, you eliminate a portion of your target market for whatever you're doing.

There comes a point at which attempting to address everyone means you start making sacrifices that impact your product/offering (lowest common denominator), which itself can eliminates some higher end clients. Or you're spending so much creating multiple separate experiences that it significantly impacts the effort you have to put in and in business that hits profitability, or otherwise can cause burnout.

So, follow elegance, as well as efficiency, in the architecture and design to make it accessible to as wider audience as is practical. You have to think about what is practical, and what you're obligations are to your audience. Being thoughtful and intentional in design is no bad thing, it stops you being lazy and loading a 50MB JPEG as the backdrop when something else will do.

It's amazingly usable when you stop trying to circumvent things.

I watch a great deal of YouTube, probably more than any other streaming service now. It's very usable with Premium.

I got YouTube Premium Family and it's so great.

Plus, I am supporting content creators better while avoiding ads.

YouTube is a modern engineering miracle, and yet it's so accessible.

People complain so much and don't appreciate what they have.

As someone in tech over 40, and who previously worked in embedded systems, it amazes me how little attention we pay to efficiency today.

I now work with teams who will think nothing of spinning up 1000 containers with 2000 vCPUs to run a microservice.

I've previously been told developer availability and developer convenience are higher priority than performance. But frankly, when you're spending millions on compute, perhaps reducing the cost of compute might be more important than finding devs?

A lot of the time the company cannot make it remote global because of tax and regulatory compliance. I work for a multinational company who has employees in at least a dozen countries, but we can't employ anyone who isn't in a country we don't have a registered company entity.

Add to that the number of people we've had apply for jobs using AI and then turn out to have zero knowledge of what we've hired them for when they turn up.

1) You can't pass a PCI-DSS audit if you have expired certificates. 2) You can't always tell the CDN providers what to do with certs. 3) We've seen examples of new root certificates that mean devices don't know about things like LetsEncrypt

I was in a meeting with a senior guy from one of the top Asian brands and I said "We're getting out of TVs, we've lost $x millions and that's enough."

He said "Hah, we can lose way more than that!"

But then they're running on the same common platform as the models half the price. But more than 95% of the cost of the TV is in the panel itself, a fancy model is usually just a bigger model and maybe some different, higher end panel. But the CPU inside is nothing special because then they can keep costs down to compete the with the cheap 60in TV you saw while shopping for groceries.

It's really hard to get these things across to consumers.

This is why we ended up with phrases like "Full HD".

The average consumer doesn't know what these numbers mean, people who read hackernews aren't the 99%. Phones have helped a little bit with widening the idea of newer = better, but ask the average person how many cores their phone is or how much RAM it has? They don't know.

Also, it's hard to benchmark TV performance as a selling point. Perhaps sites like rtings need to have UX benchmarks as well? They could measure channel change times, app load times, etc. That might create some pressure to compete.

Greater than 95% of the cost of a TV is in the panel.

TV panels must have a near 0% defect rate and a single piece of dust during the manufacture will render the finished panel e-waste. The bigger the panel the risk of a defect goes up exponentially because the surface area for any defect becomes bigger. It follows the same issue as to why chip companies introduced chiplets, the smaller die sizes improves the yield and they can throw away less silicon.

A TV panel is basically a 50in chip, and a mobile phone display is a 6in chip.

There are several examples I've seen of firmware on devices failing because of bit rot, so that's not true. We used to design devices so that the bootloader was pulled from NOR instead of NAND because of this. Then the device could be recovered using a USB stick.

Most people don't encounter it because their device was updated at least once. People should be less trusting in flash drives than they are, I recently pulled three USB flash sticks out of storage and two of the three are now unhappy.

There's a strong argument that consumer electronics should be able to be more incrementally upgraded. Including things like baseline upgrades for certificates. One of the things about TVs and these systems is that they are usually running on something like OverlayFS to avoid corruption of the base OS and enhancing security/integrity. They focus on replacing the underlying image, which is often security signed as well. If you screw something up with a device that's in a customers home then you're going to be spending a lot of money fixing it, the manufacturers have their war stories in this regard, so they're very risk adverse.

As for freezing the backend, you can't. Your API will evolve and for example if your database changes then your backend services will need to be touched. That database will change, some metadata or label will need to change. Even if you keep the API the same you'll need to maintain the legacy backend. Then you need that service running, consuming compute, for years even if there's hardly anyone using it and it's costing money. Then you need security patches for the backend service because the framework needs upgrading or the OS needs upgrading. Eventually the backend framework will be EoL/EoS and so you need to spend to upgrade. It's like saying we'll keep a Java backend running on a public facing API well beyond it's life, log4j anyone?

That's the point, there are no substantive contracts between you and the OS. If we want apps to be responsible for root certs that's interesting, but then the app needs some roof of trust with the OS anyway.

99% of consumers don't understand what that means and if we normalise the average consumer bypassing certificate checks that's definitely a bad thing.

We tried to disrupt the market, back about 10 years ago.

One of the significant problems is that 80% of TV SOCs are made by one company, MStar (or their subsidiary). And there's only a handful of companies who make the motherboards with those chipsets. Anyone entering the market either buys those or isn't competitive. It's hard to be competitive because everything is so concentrated and consolidated. Since ST Microelectronics and Broadcom left the TV chip market it became a much less diverse market.

We were an established company who made software for STBs, we had done a ground-up build of what was probably the most capable and powerful framework for TV/DVRs. The new design was commissioned from us by a well known open source Linux distro, who then decided they didn't want to continue with the project after they realised that getting into TV OS's was hard. We then took on ownership of that project but getting investment or even commitments from buyers was impossible.

The retailers and TV brands wanted to rehash the same thing over and over because that was tried and tested. It didn't matter that we made something that was provably better and used modern approaches, it wasn't worth the effort for them. If you can't order about 500,000 TVs then you're not going to get anyone to make anything custom for you these days and you'll not make a profit.

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It was a DVR/TV framework that was designed by people who had worked for big names in the TV business with a clean slate. It would handle up to 16 different broadcast networks (e.g. satellite, terrestrial, cable) and up to 255 tuners, even hot pluggable. Fast EPG processing and smart recording to either internal storage or USB storage. It was user friendly and allowed for HTML5 apps. We pushed it as much as we could but eventually on the brink of financial ruin the company was sold to someone who had no interest in what had been built. I will always feel that something great was lost.

I never worked for Samsung, but I built TVs for JVC and LG, among many other brands. I don't work in consumer electronics anymore but a decade ago that was my field.

TVs are a wildly unprofitable business. It's astoundingly bad. You get 4-6 months to make any profit on a new model before it gets discounted so heavily by retailers that you're taking a bath on each one sold. So every dollar in the BOM (bill of materials) has to be carefully considered, and not far back the CPUs in practically every TV was single core or dual core, and still under 1GHz. Bottom of the bin ARM cores you'd think twice to fit to a cheap tablet.

They sit within a custom app framework which was written before HTML5 was a standard. Or, hey want to write in an old version of .NET? Or Adobe Stagecraft, another name for Adobe Flash on TV?

Apps get dropped on TVs because the app developers don't want to support ancient frameworks. It's like asking them to still support IE10. You either hold back the evolution of the app, or you declare some generation of TV now obsolete. Some developers will freeze their app, put it in maintenance mode only and concentrate on the new one, but even then that maintenance requires some effort. And the backend developers want to shutdown the API endpoints that are getting 0.1% of the traffic but costing them time and money to keep. Yes, those older TVs are literally 0.1% or less of use even on a supported app.

After a decade in consumer electronics, working with some of the biggest brands in the world (my work was awarded an Emmy) I can confidently say that I never saw anyone doing what could be described as 'planned obsolescence'. The single biggest driver for a TV or other similar device being shit is cost, because >95% of customers want a cheap deal. Samsung, LG and Sony are competing with cheap white label brands where the customer doesn't care what they're buying. So the good brands have to keep their prices somewhere close to the cheap products in order to give the customers something to pick from. If a device contains cheap components, it was because someone said "If we shave $1 off here, it'll take $3 off the shelf price." I once encountered a situation where a retailer, who was buying cheap set-top boxes from China to stick a now defunct brandname on, argued to halve the size of an EEPROM. It saved them less than 5c on each box made.

For long life support of the OS and frameworks, aside from the fact that the CPU and RAM are poor, Samsung, LG and Sony don't make much money from the apps. It barely pays to run the app store itself, let alone maintain upgrades to the OS for an ever increasing, aging range of products.

And we as consumers have to take responsibility for the fact that we want to buy cheap, disposable electronics. We'll always look for the deal and buy it on sale. Given the choice of high quality and cheap, most people choose cheap. So they're hearing the message and delivering.

Microsoft removed support for Skype on TV, not Samsung.

Most apps get removed because the people writing them don't want to support them anymore. The Samsung framework from 2013 was always trouble and it doesn't support many current W3C features that you'd want as a developer. Most people I know are drawing the line at supporting 2014 or 2016 Samsung devices.

Could Samsung update their devices to ensure they still supported modern frameworks? Possibly, but they don't really get any revenue from providing OS upgrades and those devices suck in terms of RAM and CPU.

There's little difference between enabling a single screen shot and allowing screen recording. The rights owners require blocking of screen recording, so all screen capture gets blocked as a result.

It's also worth noting that in most cases on-net caches (in ISPs) aren't as common as people think. It's mostly private peering at public data centres. Google doesn't have servers in all ISPs, this was more common in the past than today.

Most providers who do cheap/free CDN have exclusions for serving video because the economics of it suck.

If you could opt-out of Google ads and just be distributed/indexed by YouTube, then you'd be paying for hosting/delivery/indexing. Given that the economies of scale are spread among many users, the bigger streamers who this would benefit would then make the platform worse for everyone else.

Youtube is spreading the burden of carrying all that content, from utter crap that no one watches, deep archive and onwards to Mr Beast, etc. There's a huge volume of content that Google hosts that's costing more than it earns them.

It's also important to recognise that content providers and CDNs adding private peering or hosting within ISPs doesn't diminish public peering. It actually frees up capacity on other transit routes.

ISPs don't QoS some companies to give them better service, the only difference is that in-demand companies tend to invest in capacity in partnership with ISPs. But ultimately, in most cases those investing generally use the same capacity that everyone else can use. The only company who doesn't resell their CDN capacity is Netflix. The others, Google and Amazon, dog food their own products. If you want to use the same systems as Prime or Google Video then you absolutely can. Other streaming providers use public CDN capacity just like anyone else.

Does YouTube get a favourable rate for capacity over other users? Yes and no. If Google doesn't charge YouTube then it's losing profit on the compute to sustain YT. But YT still has to make a profit and YT carries the cost burden of a great deal of legacy crap that a new entrant wouldn't. What Google has built is a miracle of engineering, to be able to get videos from relative nobodies to the other side of the in the world within minutes, at relatively high quality. While also allowing millions of kids to watch someone play Minecraft.

I respect what they've built. Would it be good to have diversity? In some ways yes, but in other ways choice sucks. Fragmentation of places to view content is something that gets increasingly complained about in the streaming world.

Is YouTube greedy? I don't think so. Building and maintaining what they've built is hard. As everyone else whose tried it knows. Just riding on their coat tails and leaching on their servers isn't sustainable. Ad blocking and saying Google deserves it isn't sustainable. In the extreme, if we burned down Google and said we wanted that model to end, the world would be a poorer place for it IMHO.

Context: 24 years in media, a decade in streaming for big companies, no affiliation with Google.

I know a few companies that have managed to get the license to do it.

F1 TV also gets radio spectrum which they use for something like 4G for their wireless cameras.

For movies and series, there's a process called "Minimum Commit" where the media companies have to commit to spend $X for a bundle of content that includes both the content you want to sell and a random selection of crap to pad out the offering. Then it depends on the deal, but often the amount that each item is watched then contributes to the royalties cost. The relative exclusivity you might want will then dictate the overall cost and royalties returned.

For sports it's different, typically you bid for the right to own a geographic market and the games are sometimes split into bundles where you can bid for one or all bundles depending on how deep your pockets are. You'll then get to keep exclusive or non-exclusive rights for a certain number of years. You'll then pay annually/quarterly for that right at the total bid package for the term of the deal (e.g. 5 years). Depending on the contract you might be able to re-sell that right to other companies as well, which dilutes your audience, but may increase the distribution overall.

Then aside from the rights, you end up paying infrastructure costs both fixed and variable. You also generally commit to CDN capacity for distribution based on a forecast of how much you think your customers will watch in any quarter.

A significant part is that there's very poor data about how many people have surround sound systems or systems that can make use of such quality.

Sending it speculatively adds to the cost of delivery, but for a percentage of the audience it pushes their video quality down to the next resolution down. And for a percentage of the audience that'll be a more noticeable impact.

Here's another oddity: there's no great ways to measure audio quality subjectively. It's kind of been done for voice telecommunications but for perceptual codecs and media sound? The tools are terrible. So, quantifying decisions about how much bandwidth to allocate are hard. Most companies still depend on trained individuals ("golden ears") to test audio quality and for independent testing you need A/B testing with a listener panel. For video quality we have accepted tools to measure quality. They're not perfect but comparatively, any time you see an audio quality test tool you'll see a substantial professional audience that will happily dismiss it.

All increases in quality, audio or video, are subject to the law of diminishing returns. In audio the argument in favour of higher quality is far weaker than it is for something like HDR.

You can get a DVI to HDMI adapter which costs less than a coffee.

Adding an HDMI connector is more likely to get you into expensive licensing discussions than DVI is.

By that measure, locks on our houses don't work, so we shouldn't bother locking the door? To repeat what I said to the other commentor:

Ultimately the goal of content protection (not just DRM) is to make it as inconvenient as possible to take content without paying. No security system is going to be perfect, but when you make it secure enough that people concentrate on weaker targets (or give up), then you're content.