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.
> "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."<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>Also does anyone know whether this was outsourced to say Accenture? It really feels like it.
Disney is responsible for vast lobbying efforts to criminalize access to culture around intellectual property.<p>Make the moral choice and pirate their content instead of giving them your money to fund further overreach.
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.
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.<p>Anyone has idea on their tech stack ? Are they using cloud?
On the one hand, of course launch day of a big service is going to have problems; they always do.<p>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?
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.
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.
Id love some inside baseball on how the big splashy launch vs engineering realities looked during discussions.<p>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.<p>This is a different beast altogether.
Why would they want to be fully working on day 1. At day 5, yes.<p>But before that, it's great marketing:<p>Our platform is too popular to handle demand currently, is the message
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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...<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466940" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466940</a>
All and all seems like a pretty successful launch. Massive scale and issues seemed to be resolved pretty quickly, props to the team !<p>I am very curious about the future of Netflix as Disney has way more content and deeper pockets.
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.