
How baseball’s tech team built HBO Now - coloneltcb
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/4/9090897/mlb-bam-live-streaming-internet-tv-nhl-hbo-now-espn
======
dangero
The funny part to me about this story is the fact that HBO had to do a 3.5
month sprint to get this out on time. Seems like incredible incompetence that
a company of their size could be this unprepared for such a major and obvious
business move.

~~~
bitmapbrother
The even funnier part is that HBO spent years and millions on their inhouse
.NET solution that was headed by a former MS exec who brought in a bunch of
his MS buddies.

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/12/hbo-cto-resigns-
as-p...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/12/hbo-cto-resigns-as-platform-
for-standalone-streaming-service-scrapped/)

>Anonymous sources speaking to Fortune say that the scrapping of project Maui
was due to a growing distrust of Berkes. Berkes joined HBO in 2012 from
Microsoft and built a Seattle office with 55 engineers, many of whom he worked
with at Microsoft. The office’s separation from New York-based employees and
its cost to the company apparently created divisions within HBO. Fortune
wrote:

"According to sources, Berkes had known about a “memory leak” [on HBO Go] for
nine months but decided it was a “non-issue.” That leak eventually led to the
HBO Go outages. Internally, some accused Berkes of using the outages as a way
to ask for more money to invest in his Seattle engineering team. He got the
investment, but HBO executives have not been pleased with what he’s delivered.
Berkes delayed product launches and was unable to deliver on upgrades. “If you
look at what [HBO Go] is today versus two years ago, he hasn’t really done
anything,” one source said."

~~~
throwaway0805
> inhouse .NET solution that

This is not true.

~~~
timboslice
Which part? That it was .NET?

------
QuercusMax
The real question is why both HBO Now and HBO Go exist. They're almost the
exact same freaking service. I honestly don't know how they're different,
except one comes free with cable and the other only works with Apple devixes.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Uhh that's already well understood. HBO Go was internally written and not very
good. They contracted MLB to write a replacement. HBO Go is on a ton of
platforms. There wasn't enough time to writ HBO Now for all of them in time
for Game of Thrones. So they started with Apple. It's already on several non-
Apple devices with more coming. They will keep adding platforms and eventually
phase HBO Go out. It's pretty straight forward.

~~~
bentcorner
I'd say it's understood from a technical perspective, but it makes no sense
from a customer perspective. Why have two apps that do nearly the same thing,
and are named nearly identically?

HBO Now could have been another log-in provider for HBO Go. Alternatively, why
can't I log into HBO Now with my HBO Go creds?

(Edit: This, to me, is a classic example of shipping the org chart.)

~~~
bproper
You can't log into HBO now with you HBO Go credentials because they are two
totally separate business models. You need a pay-tv subscription to
authenticate HBO GO, while you pay a la carte for HBO Now and don't need
cable. Cord cutter versus traditional.

~~~
arjunrc
I agree that they are two different business models, but the content on both
of them are the same, right?

Wouldn't it be easier to have two separate login pages on the same App? (One
authenticates with HBO itself & the other with Comcast/Time Warner et al.)
Once authentication is done, you get to see the same content.

They could have removed HBO Go on Apple's devices when Now launched & then
gradually remove Go, as Now spread to remaining platforms.

~~~
bentcorner
> _They could have removed HBO Go on Apple 's devices when Now launched & then
> gradually remove Go, as Now spread to remaining platforms._

This sounds like what they should have done. Replace the app with "HBO Now",
but keep the HBO Go branding, app store presence and icon. Make it a major
version update.

------
TheHydroImpulse
The NHL partnership is definitely going to be good for the game. Finally going
to introduce some modern, quality, team websites in addition to potentially
couple second delay livestreams instead of the current 90+ second GameCenter
Live offering.

NHL is also toying with more tracking technologies [1] that could make for a
pretty cool experience while watching the game live (The cost of pucks with
tracking chips were ~$200 each, which is obviously too expensive for how pucks
are used currently.)

[1]:
[http://www.nhl.com/ice/news.htm?id=750201](http://www.nhl.com/ice/news.htm?id=750201)

~~~
stoolpigeon
I've been an annual subscriber to the NHL and MLB services for 4 years. The
NHL service has been awesome, the MLB service has quite a few problems and I
find myself constantly wishing the MLB people would just do things the way the
NHL does.

The NHL removes commercial breaks, MLB leaves them in. The NHL player has a
way to skip 10 seconds forward or back - MLB player only does back. But the
worst, the MLB streams constantly get stuck and then the stream jumps back to
the beginning of the game. Then I get to start hunting for where I was.

~~~
TheHydroImpulse
Uhh, I guess Rogers GameCenter Live was a bit different. Rogers gave customers
a free access for the whole season, which resulted in ads still being there.

I've actually had the same issues happen in GameCenter Live. Lots of glitches,
laggy, and the quality was horrible, the actual game was much smaller than the
full screen.

One annoying issue was when I wanted to watch the game well after it had
started, or even after it ended but didn't want to know the score. I always
had to put my hand over sections that showed the score until I pressed the
"Hide score" button and then always quickly forcing it to start from the
beginning instead of mid way through so I wouldn't see the score.

------
chuckcode
Awesome, now I understand why there are two different HBO apps and why HBO Now
is a little clunky.

Little confused about how the article is spinning BAM as a plucky underdog.
They got $77 million dollars from Major League Owners, demanded another $10
million from TicketMaster for selling baseball tickets and have a monopoly on
some of the most popular content on the planet. I'm glad they've solved some
hard technical problems and particularly glad that I can watch Game of Thrones
without a cable contract but not sure that they are a shining example of
plucky little startup succeeding despite the odds...

~~~
adventured
Where in the article did it imply they were an underdog? They clearly spelled
out the numerous advantages BAM has had, including the capital infusions,
which implies the exact opposite of them being an underdog.

They're blatantly proclaiming BAM as being a rising juggernaut in the field of
streaming, rather than an underdog. There is frequent promotion of their scale
and accomplishments, including their revenue and how they're powering other
large businesses.

~~~
chuckcode
Perhaps I'm mistaken in my reading of the article but the quotes below set a
tone for me of an organization that was succeeding where it shouldn't have
instead of an organization with huge financial backing delivering products
that it was supposed to.

 _The group they assembled wasn’t a Silicon Valley dream team, more like
tech’s version of Bad News Bears: a minor league beat writer, a former state
treasurer, and assorted AV nerds from around the league._

 _BAM began as the in-house IT department for the league’s 30 teams, a small
handful of employees originally tasked with building websites for teams and
clubs. But over the last 15 years, BAM has emerged as the most talented and
reliable name in streaming video, a skill set suddenly in very high demand._

~~~
scott_s
That's talking about how they _began_ , 15 years ago. I think the author was
trying to get across that in the beginning, BAM was not a technical leader in
their field. But as they faced large technical and infrastructure problems
before other groups did, and they decided early on to keep development
internal, they _became_ a leader.

------
bwilliams18
One thing the HN audience might find particularly interesting. BAM is owned by
the league, and thus the teams and their myriad web of small owners, some of
whom see their ownership of BAM as more valuable than their team.

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rossjudson
I like HBO Now, but the video quality (over fiber, no less) is absolutely
terrible. It's easily the flakiest thing on my apple tvs, as well.

~~~
rspeer
You'd think playing video on a desktop computer is a solved problem, but HBO
Now manages to make it stutter like it's the '90s.

Their code is doing something ridiculously inefficient with the CPU.

------
sethd
I've noticed numerous technical issues with HBO Now while watching on Apple
TV.

There's the occasional frame rate drops from poor encoding, the frame rate
should be constant, usually around 24fps for film. The audio levels are
encoded ridiculously low compared to other services like Netflix.

The CDN itself seems to be over-saturated most of the time resulting in drops
in bit rate or occasional interruptions. This is especially true on Sunday
nights and doesn't matter how fast your connection is.

The highest quality (when you can get it) is 1080p but it doesn't matter
because the bit rate must be no more than 5Mbps, maybe even 4.5Mbps.

There are numerous bugs in the UI, just the other day I selected the Series
menu and it kept loading movies below it instead. The UX is horrible, it
doesn't track what you've watched and there's no way to view recently watched.
You can add an episode to your watch list but not a series so when you go back
via the watch list you have to way of navigating to the rest of the episodes.

I also think the price is too high, $15 a month is just a little hard to
justify based on the amount of content available. I see it more as a service I
would just subscribe to a few months out of the year.

Considering the amount of devices you have to write streaming clients for
these days (iOS, Android, Chromecast, Roku, PlayStation, Xbox, SmartTVs, etc,
etc.), why not just partner with Netflix and offer it as a Netflix add-on
using their device clients and CDN?

Realistically it's worth about $5-6 a month and if one could just add that to
their Netflix bill easily then I'm sure they would get a ton of subscribers.

~~~
sremani
So, way back like few years ago, when Reed Hastings was asked who his
competition is, he replied HBO. True to that Netflix got into the business of
new shows. So the executives of HBO will never tag along with Netflix, that is
why HBO shows are on Amazon Instant Video, not on Netflix. Even though for the
end-user there is a level difference in service provided by HBO and Netflix,
both these companies view each other as rivals.

~~~
rowofpixels
I remember when Ted Sarandos (head of content acquisition at Netflix) said
"The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us."[1]

[1] [http://www.gq.com/story/netflix-founder-reed-hastings-
house-...](http://www.gq.com/story/netflix-founder-reed-hastings-house-of-
cards-arrested-development)

------
tw04
>Because if HBO Now had come out and face planted, there would be a lot of
naysayers who turned around and said, ‘See, this is why the adults need to
handle television.’"

I think "the adults" have proven they're completely out of touch with the
average consumer and what they want. I think even with outages, people
would've continued supporting and championing HBO's "cutting the cord"
offering.

------
choppaface
I'm rather surprised that there was no other live-streaming video team that
could step in here. Can Netflix really not do live streams with only ~90s
delay? Can't Hulu stream live? YouTube has had live streaming for a while,
right? Clearly MLB (and other execs) want to own the Whole Product, but could
they not have contracted this work rather than build BAM?

I appreciate that sporting events may have special technical needs (the World
Cup was insanely popular), but I'm curious as to what special strategy BAM
uses. Do they make special traffic deals for certain markets? Or perhaps are
they really the first team to try to do very large-scale streaming with only a
~90sec delay?

~~~
reubenmorais
According to the article they were doing live streaming in 2002, years before
any of those.

Netlix - 2007

Hulu - 2008

YouTube - 2010

Hulu is US only, as far as I can tell, and Netflix still has spotty
international coverage.

~~~
mattlutze
From CNet in October 2001:

"Next season, the professional baseball organization plans to begin streaming
real-time video of games over the Internet, according to the head of its
online division.

"The move, which will be targeted largely at employees with high-speed Net
access at work, would represent the first time a major sports league has made
live games available in their entirety online, according to an MLB
representative."

[http://archive.is/20120711061344/http://news.com.com/2100-10...](http://archive.is/20120711061344/http://news.com.com/2100-1023-275123.html)

------
colinsidoti
I found this really interesting. I would love to know more about the business
relationship between the MLB, the teams, and BAM. On the surface, this reads
like the MLB simply took some huge bets that paid off: 1) $120MM in funding,
2) control over ticketing, and 3) perhaps most shockingly, not giving up on
the team despite some expensive, early failures.

I imagine there was quite a bit more adversity than the story hints, though.

Good for the MLB. I'm not used to reading about high-value tech companies
spinning out of incumbents.

------
doppel
> BAM doesn’t run like a startup — it doesn’t have equity to share with
> employees, causing it to lose out on talented engineers and developers that
> want upside beyond a salary.

Is this really true? I imagine a lot of people fit this description, but just
as many (talented) people are looking for a stable, well-paying job with
interesting challenges (which this definitely seems to provide).

------
technofiend
Unfortunately the minimum hardest requirements for PC mean that although my
little laptop streams Netflix, Amazon and YouTube just fine it stutters on HBO
Now.

It's too bad because I feel like they're missing out on a significant portion
of their market.

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HockeyPlayer
Can anyone comment on the technical architecture this kind of system uses? I
assume data flows are TCP instead of UDP? As soon as you let anyone pause or
skip you need to be streaming different data to each client.

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jdlyga
It's an excellent platform. They also developed the WWE Network, which has
been fairly rock solid since it went on air last year.

------
bproper
Another nail in cable TV's coffin

