I don’t know what it’s like elsewhere, but the Disney+ signup process here in Japan was one of the most Byzantine, Rube Goldberg-ian clusterfucks of any online product I’ve ever seen. Like, “try to create a working Minecraft account for your kid”, or “use a Logitech mouse on a Mac”-level of clusterfuckery.
I pushed through it against my better judgement for reasons that don’t matter here, but then as soon as I could muster up the patience I sat down and canceled it and would never give them money again. The contrast with Netflix, Apple TV, etc couldn’t have been more stark.
Total mystery to me how these companies think this is acceptable for a product which presumably costs them a lot to put together and run.
> I don’t know what it’s like elsewhere, but the Disney+ signup process here in Japan was one of the most Byzantine, Rube Goldberg-ian clusterfucks of any online product I’ve ever seen.
It's just Japan (and some other Asian countries): for Japan it's because there is already a previous service that was jointly operated with NTT Docomo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Deluxe), in some other countries similar joint ventures existed.
Everything use to be consolidated with Cable companies, then it was Cable and Netflix, then went to 100s of apps which is a nightmare. As all probably could have predicted like the universe it's starting to contract again. First with HBO and Discovery merging their apps, and now Disney and Hulu in the US at least.
While there are downsides to consolidating of course, there are far too many currently and hopefully more merge together, or AppleTV and others become better at providing a UI that merges them all together for the user, but of course that is counter to what each company whats, notably Netflix among others.
Hulu Live, is such a different app that Disney, so will be interesting to see how those two merge.
In my opinion, we need more streaming apps, not fewer. However, for that to actually work, we new legislation that the producer of content cannot be the distributor, and that the producer must license it out equally to any distributor.
The problem we are in right now, is every producer is also the distributor and is siloing their content.
I want to be able to select my preferred content platform, but should be able to access _all_ content on that platform.
Then distributors (apps) compete in different ways and at different price points. Some examples:
- 4k vs HD streaming
- Offline downloads
- Pay per hour vs unlimited
- Extra enhancements like Amazon's X-Ray
- Better curation
- Different recommendation algorithms
- live vs on-demand
Then _I_ have a choice in how I experience content. We got lucky and have this with the music industry. Very little content is siloed, so I still have a choice on Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, Tidal, Bandcamp, or just à la carte purchases and curating my own collection.
The problem with the app explosion is the UX in that they constantly sign you out and you have to renter your password and the login interface is crap. I would think 50% of the churn they see are people canceling because of that dynamic.
The only people that figured this out is Amazon via the Channels app which just works basically and you only have to remember one password and you basically never get signed out.
I pushed through it against my better judgement for reasons that don’t matter here, but then as soon as I could muster up the patience I sat down and canceled it and would never give them money again. The contrast with Netflix, Apple TV, etc couldn’t have been more stark.
Total mystery to me how these companies think this is acceptable for a product which presumably costs them a lot to put together and run.