
Disney+ hit by technical glitches on launch day - zafar1
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50390589
======
MentallyRetired
I don't think anyone on hackernews would be surprised by this. The scale they
have to operate at is absolutely insane. To scale flawlessly on day 1 is a big
ask of any development team.

~~~
cookiecaper
Indeed. Last night I was telling my wife that it'll be real interesting to see
how well the launch goes and that I'd expect them to have continuous issues
for the first 3-6 months (which may be Netflix's only prayer).

Video is hard to get right, with quirks across many combinations of
platform/device/OS/browser version/video card/playback resolution/format
features, and it consumes around 90% of total internet traffic. Netflix has
spent the last decade building and tuning a truly world-class content delivery
system (big props to all the Netflix HN readers). There's no way Disney
would've been able to match that prior to go-live.

The logical conclusion, of course, is that Disney should've just bought
Netflix, and it wouldn't be too surprising to see that happen now that their
internal attempt has proven that pixie dust doesn't go quite far enough to
magically remediate the limitations of physics. Gotta get Netflix-esque
content delivery appliances colocated alongside ISP hardware for that type of
thing.

~~~
jonwachob91
>>> The logical conclusion, of course, is that Disney should've just bought
Netflix

Why buy Netflix when you could get a similarly qualified team and
infrastructure by buying Hulu? Oh wait... Disney already owns Hulu... Whoops.

What about ESPN. ESPN has a really good streaming product. Oh wait... Disney
already owns that one too...

Disney didn't need to buy Netflix, they just needed to use the resources they
already owned!

~~~
newfangle
I believe disney has every advantage in the streaming wars so i decided to see
if they have any open dev positions and i also decided to check what reviews
of working there were like. Seems like Disney does not have an engineering
culture and software engineers are at the bottom of the totem pole.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
This kind of makes sense. It isn't their competency. I think it's general
advice to never work in a role at a company where that's not their core
competency. E.g., engineers are praised at places like Google, etc. Engineers
working in entertainment (e.g, Disney) or health care (e.g, Epic Systems) are
not as well treated.

~~~
scarface74
Disney has always been about technology. From the animatronics and the other
attractions at the theme parks to the engineers at Pixar and LucasFilms.

As I posted above, they own BAMTech, one of the most well respected companies
in the streaming infrastructure space.

Building for scale is not hard for good engineers, building for rapid,
reliable scale from day one is hard. No one knows how to do it. Building for
scale is always about patching holes while you grow slowly.

Even Google doesn’t do big band released like Disney tried to do. They keep
things in beta, start off with a limited number of invitations until they work
all of the kinks out.

Netflix didn’t become popular overnight. They had time to scale out slowly and
on different devices.

~~~
georgeecollins
>> Disney has always been about technology.

Um.. have you ever worked at Disney? It's a great company but having worked
there I wouldn't describe it that way.

>> From .. the engineers at Pixar and LucasFilms.

Two visionary companies, staffed by many ex-Disney employees and bought by
after their technical innovations were completely mature.

Disney is an amazing company that I respect but having worked there I would
say that modern Disney is about brands and family entertainment and they
figure out technology when they have to.

~~~
scarface74
_and they figure out technology when they have to._

How is that different than any other company? When you do otherwise, you end
up with Google that just throws a lot of stuff up against the wall and
comparatively little sticks or the pre-Jobs 2.0 Apple with the “Advance
Technology Group” that couldn’t ship a product if their life depended on it.

------
dgritsko
> "Disney has estimated it will need to attract at least 60 million
> subscribers, putting it on a par with Netflix, in order for Disney+ to break
> even."

How's that for a barrier to entry? I don't doubt that they will be able to hit
it, but it's still a mind-bogglingly high number. I think that's part of why
I'd like to see Netflix's continued success - competition is a good thing, and
if they were to ever go under I doubt we'd see a replacement.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
Netflix has ~160 million subscribers. So, they're saying they need to be a
third of the size of Netflix to break even. Since "break even" isn't all that
interesting to investors, for it to be profitably worthwhile, I'd imagine they
need to essentially become as big as Netflix.

It seems unclear how feasible that may be. The only thing keeping me wanting
to use Netflix is quality content, which has been in decline recently. Given
all of the recognizable brands under the Disney name, maybe people will
switch. At a technical level, I question their ability to pull off offering a
service as large as Netflix with high availability. Netflix offers very
competitive compensation to their engineering talent.

~~~
empath75
people who have kids are going to get disney, no matter what.

~~~
standardUser
Most kids I know watch YouTube primarily, followed by Netflix. Kids freaking
love YouTube.

~~~
mcv
They do. Kids-wise, we'd be fine without Disney+ and Netflix. My youngest is a
big fan of Thomas the Tank Engine, but even on Youtube, he doesn't want to see
the actual Thomas shows, but videos of people playing with Thomas toys. No
idea why this is such a popular thing, but my oldest watched people play Mario
at that age. And now he watches people play Minecraft.

I don't get it. Go play these things yourself, but apparently kids love to
watch others play, and there's tons and tons of that on Youtube.

------
lordnacho
One thing I haven't heard is how DisneyLife fits into this. I use it at the
moment for my kids and it has all the stuff you expect from Disney, basically
the animated movies like a Frozen and Moana.

The service is terrible, often breaks, and has an undocumented but necessary
auth code step, with the added gotcha that the ui covers over the code
sometimes. The ui is also terrible, who would make it so the next episode of a
series doesn't come on by itself? Children are the target audience.

Anyway why wouldn't they either fix up what they've got, or use the lessons so
that they don't get a meltdown on the first day?

Also does anyone know whether this was outsourced to say Accenture? It really
feels like it.

~~~
madrox
Hello! Former engineering director for DisneyLife here. Most of the team
wasn't allowed to move to Disney+ and have since moved on. The DisneyLife
journey would make a great book, but doesn't really fit into a HN comment.

FWIW, DisneyLife was built by a team smaller than most YC startups. The core
technology for DRM/streaming was licensed by another company. When BAM was
purchased, the entire product got outsourced. The auth was a central service
that we didn't own but were required to use. When I left, we had autoplay of
next episodes.

~~~
CountSessine
Have you ever considered writing a blog about your experiences there? What
little you did write here in the response about DisneyLife is actually how I
think Disney+ is going to turn out (small team, underfunded, demoralized,
forced to license 3rd rate tech based on external mandates, etc).

~~~
madrox
Maybe one day when I can feel more analytical about it. This is a weird day
for me, as you can imagine. Also, lots of people I know and like have put a
lot of time into Disney+. I don't want to take away from what they're trying
to accomplish right now.

~~~
weej
I feel ya, Mr. Horn. :-)

~~~
madrox
When are you going to reply to my text messages!

------
cwkoss
Disney is responsible for vast lobbying efforts to criminalize access to
culture around intellectual property.

Make the moral choice and pirate their content instead of giving them your
money to fund further overreach.

~~~
edoceo
Wouldn't the moral choice be to just not watch? Isn't piracy stealing?
Morally: don't buy it, don't steal it and also don't view it. Reward other
content providers and reduce the relevance of Disney.

~~~
cwkoss
Piracy isn't stealing, that's intellectual property lobbyist propaganda.

I would happily download a car: zero cost reproduction of useful things makes
society as a whole richer. The content industry needs to figure out a new
business model to adapt to the information age, and the longer people pay for
digital content the more funds these outdated relics will have for legislating
a moat around their "property". I'd much prefer a kickstarter or patreon-like
model where superfans could fund and watch and participate in development.

~~~
julienb_sea
Patreon and kickstarter models function based on closed-off perks for the
supporters, not just superfans ready to give money for no reason. This is
reliant on some protection for those perks, otherwise there is no reason for
that model.

The idea that piracy isn't stealing is nonsense. Why don't you try creating
something, then having someone rip it off against your will, plaster it all
over their ad-supported platform and flip you the bird when you ask for a
share of proceeds.

~~~
wolco
I've seen developers spend years making a game only to have little press and
no one buying or playing it.

That game was put on torrent sites and people started to write about it and
the game became a success.

Piracy can turn a great product that no one knows about into a success.

~~~
cwkoss
I agree. I think the segment of people who are willing to pay full price but
pirate purely for financial reasons is vanishingly small.

Most pirates are trying content they would not be willing to buy, which
expands the market for most content (provided that content hasn't already been
carpetbombed via ads across many media channels so most people already know
about it).

------
jboggan
My Facebook feed this morning was filled with friends at home watching Disney+
with their children because of the snow days closing schools across the
country. I know scaling a service on Day 1 is difficult but I imagine their
load is much higher than expected.

~~~
mucle6
If a snow day is enough to overload their servers, I don't think they would
stand a chance on the weekends.

~~~
codycraven
It's a day one launch of a huge product. I'd imagine they chose a Tuesday
release so that they could have time to understand their own scaling issues
before the weekend, a freak cold front seemed to sabotage that grace period
and yet they responded well.

Disclosure, I'm a software engineer. I also own Disney stock. No insider
information, just how I'd have planned a huge release like this.

------
cryptozeus
They said on Twitter that launch exceeded their wildest imagination :) I guess
this is a good problem to have. Also if you see twitter feed, those issues
were fixed pretty quickly so my guess is this was just a unintentional ddos on
their servers due to launch. As people dropped off, it released those locks.

Anyone has idea on their tech stack ? Are they using cloud?

------
Qwertystop
On the one hand, of course launch day of a big service is going to have
problems; they always do.

On the other hand, Disney owns Hulu. Why is this a launch day of anything
other than the cosmetic parts of the frontend and a new empty copy of some
databases? What is there to break that's not already well-established?

~~~
Hamuko
Pretty sure it's not built on top of Hulu. They bought a majority in BAMTech
way before getting Hulu.

~~~
dwoozle
Hulu is dogshit technically, I would hope that Disney+ doesn’t hit a line of
Hulu code.

~~~
milesokeefe
What technical issues/deficiencies have you seen with Hulu?

~~~
crooked-v
On Apple TV I run into constant "cannot be played" errors that go away after
hitting the menu button and reslecting the same item.

------
gfodor
The Mouse must flow.

Seriously tho, I'd imagine this was a heck of a big lift.

------
spike021
Managed to download the Apple TV app and watch the first episode of The
Mandalorian last night when it released early. Watching that episode was
completely smooth at the time. But later while just browsing I found several
issues. Some content curation related, like one or two shows only having a
single season listed, but multiple seasons' worth of episodes assigned to that
single season. Also, the queuing system (adding shows/movies to the watchlist
or w/e they call it) didn't seem to work; the check mark showed after
selecting it for each item, but nothing would actually come up on the queue
page.

------
baddox
Interesting, it worked great for me last night (west coast US) on an Apple TV.
The video quality is great (I’m watching on a nice 4K HDR TV) and seems to
load impossibly fast when I scrub through a video.

~~~
xenospn
Maybe you’re the one who broke it by scrubbing too much ;)

------
thinkingkong
Id love some inside baseball on how the big splashy launch vs engineering
realities looked during discussions.

Lots of other new services basically end up being able to “take advantage” of
being early market entrances or their own obscurity and then scale with
growth.

This is a different beast altogether.

~~~
stefan_
Remember Disney+ isn't completely new software, Disney acquired MLBtv aka
BAMtech to run the site. And their business is live streaming, not "merely"
VoD.

~~~
jld
Disney also operates Hulu.

~~~
durden0
I thought they were a partial investor/owner, not an operator.

~~~
jld
They are the operator and majority shareholder, and have agreed to purchase
the rest of the shares from Comcast by 2024.
[https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/14/media/disney-buys-comcast-
hul...](https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/14/media/disney-buys-comcast-hul..).

------
NicoJuicy
Why would they want to be fully working on day 1. At day 5, yes.

But before that, it's great marketing:

Our platform is too popular to handle demand currently, is the message

~~~
crooked-v
Also, launching on a Tuesday is a great way to get people to hammer on the
service for a few days before 'seriously' using it for 'movie night' on a
Friday or Saturday.

~~~
EpicEng
At least, it would have been, if not for the massive early winter storm
currently barreling across the Midwest.

------
rawoke083600
Ja a good rule/tip I learned about scaling: Everyone knows their first
bottleneck... be the the db, the search service or the webserver... very few
ppl know their SECOND bottleneck. Sometimes the first bottleneck is fixed
suddenly(new upgrade, fixed config) but few people knows their second item in
the chain that's the bottleneck and get hit by this in production.

------
mcv
They also had glitches before launch day. I've had Disney+ for about a month
(nice of them to use Netherland as their try-out region), and one of the first
things I tried was chromecast some old Spiderman cartoons (because my youngest
son is a fan). Those that had Dutch translations either failed to play, or
failed when I tried to cast them. English-only ones worked fine most of the
time.

And in general, support for chromecast was very flaky. It usually works the
first time, but when you pause or want to play something else, it loses track
of what it was casting or that it's even an option at all.

Still, it's to be expected for a new service. I assume they work hard to fix
all the bugs. It's nice to have easy access to all Marvel movies and Phineas
and Ferb.

------
Jaruzel
Us poor UK based people wouldn't know... it's not launching here until March
2020 (As Sky still have a licence for Disney content until then). Elsewhere
I've read that Disney+ has some pretty agressive anti-VPN detection, so you
can't bypass the location lock-in either.

As an aside, Disney+'s main draw 'The Mandalorian' is already freely available
to download if you know where to look. So, well done Disney, you've totally
played into the pirates hands.

------
intrnttrll
Can't help but remember that just a few days ago, when disney PR was ramping
up all over social media, the top comment was praising Iger and how great of a
CTO he was and what a great tech company Disney was...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466940)

------
aprdm
All and all seems like a pretty successful launch. Massive scale and issues
seemed to be resolved pretty quickly, props to the team !

I am very curious about the future of Netflix as Disney has way more content
and deeper pockets.

------
mixxit
do they use kubernetes?

~~~
diffeomorphism
I could only find something about them generally using kubernetes (from 2017)
[https://www.linux.com/news/how-disney-realizing-multi-
cloud-...](https://www.linux.com/news/how-disney-realizing-multi-cloud-
promise-kubernetes/)

Is there any recent article discussing the tech behind Disney+ specifically?

------
JadoJodo
I wonder if this is the cause of the error I've seen: Error Code 83. There
doesn't seem to be an official help page for this error.

~~~
dstaley
No, code 83 occurs when your device doesn't support the level of Widevine DRM
used by Disney+.

------
skrebbel
To be fair, this wasn't launch day. Disney+ has been around in The Netherlands
for quite a while now

~~~
EpicEng
Sure... But it's a country of 17M. More people than that probably signed up
today.

------
jonplackett
Anyone who’s used their old streaming service Disney Life will be very, very,
very unsurprised by this.

------
romanovcode
AWS, Google Cloud and Azure were all having problems yesterday in Europe.
Maybe that was the reason.

------
not2b
I got that error screen this morning. I guess they'll get it sorted out soon.

------
jl6
I cannot imagine any org being able to pull off such a large scale launch as
one single event. Makes me wonder why they didn’t try to phase it by offering
“insider” access, trial periods, limited invites, etc. like Gmail did back
when it launched.

~~~
dwoozle
They did do all that.

------
shmerl
And of course, they are so obsessed with DRM, that it doesn't work on Linux.
What else to expect from Disney.

~~~
nyuszika7h
It's probably because Widevine on Linux doesn't support VMP. But even Amazon
Prime Video streams in SD on Linux, better than nothing but still a bad
experience for users.

~~~
shmerl
Whatever it is, it's simply dumb and totally Disney style.

~~~
EpicEng
Is it dumb though? Why should they care about Linux users? Really, how does it
make sense for them to spend time on it?

~~~
shmerl
It sure is, because it will be broken and pirated either way. So what did they
achieve? They simply lost paying customers, nothing more.

It totally makes no sense to spend any time and resources on DRM. Instead,
they should start offering video DRM-free for sale, not just for rent.

The reasons they are pushing this junk are political. As was well explained
here:
[https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...](https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree_movies/post499)

Also, surprising to see so many here on HN endorsing DRM junk and those who
push it on everyone.

~~~
papln
If you don't like DRM, why do you want to buy/rent Disney stuff from the
company that invented and bribed Congress to create modern Draconian copyright
law?

~~~
shmerl
I don't use them and don't rent anything from them.

~~~
EpicEng
Yet you seem pretty annoyed by their lack of Linux support...

I don't want to go too far on this because I agree with you on DRM, but
"doesn't work on Linux" is a non-issue for most consumer products, for
whatever reason.

~~~
shmerl
Sure, you should be annoyed, since it's caused by them using DRM ;) I pointed
it out very explicitly in the original comment. I.e. it's not like they are
specifically anti-Linux, they are simply DRM obsessed. Which of course doesn't
make it any better for Linux users.

~~~
EpicEng
I think it's more that they are DRM obsessed and don't give two flying ducks
about Linux. If Linux were important, their DRM would work on it. For one I
blame them, for the other I don't.

I have to admit I just don't care that much anymore. In the spectrum of things
I have the time and energy to really care about, DRM has fallen off the list.
I want to watch The Mandalorian, and damn; it was pretty great.

~~~
shmerl
My point is simple, DRM-free services have no issues with video on Linux,
because video doesn't really depend on the platform. Video is video
everywhere. As long as they aren't using some crazy custom codecs that no one
has support for, it will work.

DRM on the other hand is a platform dependent junk. So quite naturally it
limits use cases which work with it.

~~~
EpicEng
That is not in any way untrue... but I understand why they don't care :)

~~~
shmerl
Well, they don't need to care (about supporting DRM), they just need to stop
being DRM freaks to begin with and start releasing DRM-free. That's the only
real fix :) But of course, it's Disney we are talking about. They never learn.

------
magoon
This is overblown.

Disney+ was mostly fine all day for everybody I know. I consider it a
successful launch by any measure.

------
pastor_elm
"Who knew hosting could be so complicated?" \- Mickey Mouse

~~~
tabtab
Some goofy coder did a mickey mouse software job.

------
cycop
How can you be unprepared for the load? They would have and should have
expected and tested for the load on launch day.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Well, it doesn't necessarily make sense to be prepared.

You'd basically be preparing for a load spike that you're unlikely to see ever
again. It probably makes more sense for most systems to just take the L on day
0 and design for day 1+ instead of designing for day 0 and being
overengineered for day 1+.

~~~
dwoozle
That’s not the kind of thinking that really works for a brand with such
massive consumer trust as Disney. You’re talking about a brand worth $100-200
billion, you don’t just “Take an L.”

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Why not? How many customers do you think Disney lost for its morning
disruptions? I'd guess basically zero.

~~~
dwoozle
That kind of thinking isn’t how top brands are built. Lexus doesn’t lose any
customers if the scan button on the LS400 radio is a little fiddly, but that
kind of thinking will poison a brand.

