I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants. The majority of people who buy streaming, I suspect, are interested mainly in the conveyor belt of diverse and engaging content. Sure I whack an episode of Rick and Morty on via Netflix once a month, but 90% of viewing is of new serialized content.
Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay. But the IP dilution and very real costs of beaming 4K video around the world on demand don’t mix well together.
Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has.
It’s a classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy - so they abandon their sublet and try to build a mall from scratch - the models are vastly different, and perhaps in this case, lethal.
Disney could have done that and I would have paid.
But they don’t make shows people want to watch any more. Live action Mulan could have been awesome! But they destroyed the themes of family honor and removed the music and comedy.
Pander fatigue is real. I’ve got kids but I’m letting my Disney sub lapse. Anime is way better than the schlock Disney puts out.
The streamers make some shows that some people want to watch.
Netflix’s report, first of its kind, showed 20 titles that you will have never heard of unless you use TikTok.
Most people are watching the shows most other people are watching, it’s memetic. People want to feel like they’re a part of something; that is they’re are willing to pay $20/mo in Fear of Missing Out.
Nobody has FOMO for old Disney content. The largest expense for Netflix is creating content, all the shows in that report were from 2022 and 2023.
The kicker is that it’s the opposite of the top of the Steam charts, indicating how bad of a business the streamers are in. Those games are most free and have been around for a long time, sometimes decades.
Both games and TV/movies were threatened by piracy. Yet the result for TV/movies was wildly undercharging for the stuff people were pirating - giving away the old catalogue content on the premise they were competing with $0, simultaneously ceasing to monetize their pay to play audience. Huge mistake: they should have wildly increased enforcement, which would have been much much cheaper and effective. TV/movies just do not have enough secular ways to innovate like games do to completely supplant piracy from a technological and social perspective.
Two takeaways: (1) the pay to watch model model was much more sustainable, because most content makes way more sense to sell for those payers, it was non-FOMO content, it was good content. (2) in order to make most of the highly engaged streaming content sustainable, streamers must innovate in monetization, and it’s not obvious if ads will be enough.
My kids watch minecraft and roblox streams ad infinitumon youtube though.. I pay for ad free youtube and ad free streaming services but they still know of and want the latest toys. It's amazing. My kids never want to watch a movie or tv show, only youtube.
> Huge mistake: they should have wildly increased enforcement
They did. However, it turns out that often, you're suing upstanding citizens for what the public views as minor infractions. This does not really recoup costs. It does act as a deterrent, both for Joey Public to illegally download your content, but also for them to spend money on acquiring your content legally. For some reason, the big fish are hard to catch, and catching one doesn't move the needle on illegally downloaded content much.
Moreover, they're not just competing with illegally downloaded content. Disney's back catalogue has been sold for literally decades. I bet that before the era of streaming, most folks lived within 10 houses of a legal, viewable copy of Disney's big hits (Lion King, Aladdin, Little Mermaid, etc). And if not, physical media of such movies and series are typically available on 2nd-hand markets for very affordable prices*. That's what the back catalogue of Disney (and others) needs to compete with first and foremost.
* case in point: I bought a 7 season, 24ish episode/season series on Ebay for 50. Watching it with the envisioned company (ie. no binging) took months; streaming would have been more expensive already at 5 bucks per month.
It depends on the age of the kids—for the price of a Disney+ subscription you can buy ~2 DVDs a month, which at my kid's age (4 and 2) is way more frequently than they actually want to watch new movies. When I was a kid, (and I'm seeing it with my own kids) we had a tiny selection of movies that we loved to watch repeatedly. Why pay rent for that selection when you could own it for the same price?
Is that true for all kids? I thought popular opinion was that all new gen kids have insatiable content appetites with low attention spans demanding constant newness?
My 4 year old has had unlimited access to most services since 2. Mostly what she does is watches the same 10ish hours of content whatever that is for about a month. And then she picks another 10 hours. This 10 hours may or may not include things from previous 10 hour binges.
Kids like repetition. They are perfectly willing to watch the same season of something over and over again even when they could technically choose to watch something brand new
If you feed them a constant stream of new content, yeah, they'll probably be that way, but they're not born with an insatiable desire for novel consumption.
I think it depends on the person. Other than a few favorites, I've never tended to rewatch movies, reread books, replay games, etc. I think that a lot of it may be that a lot of the appeal to me is in "figuring out" the content so that once I know how things play out I don't care all that much about reexperiencing the playing out itself.
I don't think that's a good argument. You find "new" when rewatching. The moment is not engaging anymore, it means you drained the entirety of the content
I imagine this greatly depends on the age of the kids and their immediate friend groups. A very young child generally isn't going to care or even understand some movie or show is old or not, everything in life is new to them.
Important point about relative novelty, but kids aren’t subscribers / account holders / bill payers, so I can see how the population with children can become a persistent subscriber base, but growth requirements necessitate either more children (joking) or providing better content.
It’s pretty interesting to think about how technology and scalability play into the costs of the streaming model. Netflix’s engineering capabilities are well respected, I find it hard for another company to replicate this success without using better technology to offer the same service: do we know the technological infrastructure quality of Disney+ or Hulu? Have they encountered costly scaling problems that eat into budgets?
Not to backseat parent or anything, but I would never let my kids watch Anime unsupervised. Disney is fine, and they aren't going to sexualize minors like anime often does.
...I'm really having trouble understanding this comment. Maybe my sarcasm detector is broken?
Watching anything unsupervised is of course age-dependent, so I'm not sure I understand the mechanism at work in that part of the comment.
But on the deeper matter of Disney vs. anime:
Obviously anime is a huge basket, so it depends on what studio and creator(s) we're talking about.
There's plenty of amazing, reinforcing, validating, positive anime to be found. The Miyazaki films are, without exception, lovely and perfectly messaged for kids of all ages, including this 41-year-old. There are many other non-Miyazaki works from Studio Ghibli that are similarly friendly.
Disney, on the other hand, absolutely sexualizes and gaslights vulnerable populations. I loved Beauty and the Beast growing up, but in retrospect I realize that it taught a generation of little girls to endure abuse in the hopes of some magical transformation. Aladin is horrifyingly racist and two-dimensional. Pocahontes? Holy fuck.
Compare the Disney and Ghibli renditions of The Little Mermaid and tell me which one is made with greater concern over kids' worldview and mental health, let alone faithful passage of the ecological message of novel.
The Disney formula is very often predicated on a woman whose value is in her sexuality and virginity, with men who are divided into distinctly "good" and "evil" camps who fight over her. It's absolutely the kind of sexualization that is toxic for kids.
The truth is kids are resiliant and not stupid. generations "survived" these types of stereotypes and in 20 years someone else will be wringing their hands about the misguided stereotypes the current crop of acceptable movies is involved in (including everything you listed as a positive).
I would never hesitate to allow a child to watch any disney movie, but I definitely would hesitate to allow a child to watch Berserk or a lot of the borderline loli content. I remember watching Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and waiting for the hammer to drop on the PE teacher who was constantly creeping on the teenage girls. When the season ended and it never happened I was completely confused, it wasn't until years later I found out that's an actual trope that shows up in a lot of anime.
What I'm saying is that I don't disagree with you that there are plenty of anime that's perfectly fine for children to watch, but the other posters concern is absolutely valid too, there's a lot of anime children shouldn't be watching (opening scene of elfin lied anyone?) and your hand wringing about Disney movies not being perfect doesn't move that needle in the slightest.
I'm not sure it's a fair to compare your average Disney movie to famously transgressive/extreme examples of anime like Berserk or Elfin Lied. That would be like comparing One Piece to something like Watership Down.
For every Berserk or Elfin Lied there's a Bocchi the Rock! or Spy Family.
Everybody wanted to control the entire pie, when in reality almost all of them would have been better off just licensing their content to Netflix and not worrying about streaming distribution
So much this. Netflix was valuable to me because I could watch any movie at any time, but now the streaming space is so fragmented that no single provider is worth the price of the subscription, so our family doesn't pay for any of them.
We told ourselves that if we really want to watch movies we'd just rent them off Amazon on a case-by-case basis, but in practice we just completely stopped consuming streaming content as a family. If there are other families like us, then their greed made the whole pie much smaller.
I keep Netflix subscription most out of loyalty than anything else. I've had Amazon prime since it was first introduced but may drop it after the recent announcement.
I also tend to rent from Amazon if it's not on netflix, but if it's on neither or I disagree with the rent price or they don't allow you to rent, I just pirate.
I'm ok with them having my money, but once they started pulling everything off of netflix the entire landscape because anti-consumer. Their greed lost them my money.
I am in this boat as well. Our stream subscriptions are down to zero -- just the one I get for free with my cell carrier. And as for Disney and whatever the heck it is they have become, I have reverted back to purchasing purchased discs of any good movies or series.
Same, and with my toddler we’re back to good old fashioned DVDs. They may be slower, fragile and have a few unskippable parts but at least the ads are predictable, they don’t involve endless scrolling, and they belong to you.
If we didn't have at least 3 major services, ultimately said services would have made contracts that would have taken most of the value of the deal: That's basically what Netflix was doing when they were the only game in town. We have too many streaming services now, but a monopolist with sensible prices was never the way it was going to end.
It would’ve been interesting if the major studios made their own Netflix.
Assuming they could execute technically on it, then a consumer would have just one subscription to get a ton of great content, and honestly would probably be compelling to have that AND Netflix (all the long tail stuff).
Depending on what you mean by "studios", is this not what Hulu was? A joint ownership between multiple partners... ultimately down to Disney now but not originally.
> better off just licensing their content to Netflix
the thing is, this makes your IP a commodity. If netflix truly has a monopoly on the market like this, then they can supress the price of the licensing down to very low, and therefore disney would make very little money from the licensing.
If the IP is valuable that would in the negotiation. Simply put, there would be a minimum Disney would require from Netflix for their content. Better yet, structure some type of Joint-Venture deal with Netflix if the Disney content is so valuable (I suspect it is not…)
> a minimum Disney would require from Netflix for their content.
and netflix would just play hardball, since the scenario proposed by the grandparent post is one where only netflix is doing streaming.
> Joint-Venture deal with Netflix
which is not the scenario proposed by the GP - and in any case, this is not different from today, where every media company wants to own their own distribution network.
Well of course they'd have been. But prevailing wisdom just few years back was Disney's of the world can just steamroll Netflix of the world because they own all the content. Developing streaming system is only some low level implementation detail in larger scheme of things.
...and Netflix couldn't grow as a tech company paying the ever increasing content costs (and wasn't happy with a utility company valuation) so has spent enormous sums on just terrible shows.
If you're an executive at any of these companies: VERTICAL INTEGRATION
Ok but what's wrong with becoming a basic content internet utility? Why can't Netflix "just" be YouTube for professionally made TV and movie content, with a great UI? Why is that a bad business?
The Netflix Ui/UX sucks bad enough that I quit the service over it. I for one do not want them to gain a foothold in the market similar to YouTube, because their market dominance would just lead to the formation of yet another cesspool of shit content.
On the flip side, the old content is exactly what I want. I'm a big fan of Star Trek, including TNG, Voyager, DS9, and even Enterprise. If I play music while I work, I find myself getting distracted by it. So, I prefer to have Star Trek playing in the background since I've seen every episode multiple many times it's really just comforting background competence porn. Other than that, I don't really watch much TV but it's nice to have if I'm bored.
In the last year, I've had to switch streaming providers four times to access this catalogue. I've moved from Netflix to Paramount to Crave (I'm in Canada) and now I'm back on Netflix. For Christmas, I bought myself a Mini PC and a subscription to Proton VPN. At this point, I've spent enough money on Star Trek and a small amount of movies that I don't feel the moral issues I would if I were pirating indie games or something similar.
Voyager was one series I never completed before the streaming roulette started. Not sure how I started looking for it but I finally said no thanks to subs and bought a box set for 50 bucks. I can watch at my own pace and don't have to shell out 10-25 bucks every month. Have seen DS9 but may do the same there since the price (50 bucks) is so compelling as compared to streaming monthly costs, and you get to keep it forever (forever defined by some arbitrary parameter and not equal to infinity)
I was gutted when Paramount took ST:Discovery off Netflix. But not only did it not cause me to shell out for a Paramount subscription, it made me decide that I was completely done with Star Trek. I’m cured!
Because buy doesn't exist in a sane form for some things. Kids shows are known for never selling by season and only by some weird theme and of course there are dupes between sets. Buy isn't an option at all for some stuff. I'm looking at you Disney vault bulkshit, but also other not as iconic stuff.
Yes pirate, but that's a problem too. I've tried to pirate some stuff that wasn't popular or it was too old and you're just not able to.
Streaming removes a lot of that hassle. Now that the price is becoming too high, people are considering other options, but there is a reason it exists. Streaming is how I let my kids explore media. Yes, I can just give them my childhood favs, but they need a way to try new shows without me directly interfering and it's been great. I would have never picked out my kid's favs for her.
Netflix's secret starting in their DVD days was to provide a service that had way more variety than Blockbuster, so that no matter who you were, the movies you wanted to watch would be available.
Disney especially was arrogant enough to assume that they controlled all the IP that people actually want to watch, so they thought they could just pull out of Netflix and everyone would switch. But that's not how movie preferences work. There's no brand loyalty, there are movies (and shows) people like and movies they don't, and each person's set of preferred movies is unique and spread out across studios. Disney isn't Apple.
To be honest I give credit to consumers to puncture Disney's inflated ego and bring them down to earth. If a minimum threshold of folks kept hankering for Disney's content to keep them in good financial condition they'd remain arrogant as ever.
You also have to be willing to be put out good content that isn't written by ChatGPT, which, as we've seen, Disney has been unable to do for quite some time.
> Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay.
Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money. Their movies and shows sound like propaganda with Twitter quips and they aren't good. Marvel and star wars peaked under Disney the same way that Apple peaked from Tim Cook in terms of profit, only apple products are still good.
You can be mean to people too! However, if you want to model the corporations correctly, you'll not go very far by thinking they are soulless machines. Most of the reasons corporations fail is people making awful decisions than help themselves personally, and harm long term corporate value.
As for low-quality content, I work with people that have made very bad entertainment. Nobody starts out thinking they'll make something bad. There might be some lowering of standards when, say, the voice acting manager and the voice actor decide that it's not coming out right, and there's no budget to try another 3 days.CGI gets planned for some amount, and when time and a half that is spent, Leia still looks like she is made of plastic. Maybe the writing sounded good to a decision maker, but they had terrible taste. Nobody tries to make it bad, but sometimes we get to choose between bad, and probably still mediocre, and massively unprofitable.
That was Disney's problem this year. A lot of content was super expensive: Go look at the budget for Dial of Destiny, or the per-episode cost of she-hulk. So high that they'd have to be the most viewed things ever to have a prayer at being worthwhile. People were trying their best, and the output wasn't a total embarrassment... but they were all money losers.
> That was Disney's problem this year. A lot of content was super expensive
The streaming model requires a conveyor belt of content to work. And movies are expensive to produce, consume a lot of bandwidth, and not really replayable. The constraints tend to give bad content. It’s the whole cheap, fast, and good triangle.
Corporations are people when it benefits them, and are mindless machines when it benefits them.
Right now they're people because they're being criticized. When they do massive layoffs they're just a business doing business things. When it comes to advertising they're people with free speech rights, but when they're committing wage theft they're just businesses and no one goes to jail. When they hire lobbyists it's their right as people, but when they violate laws meant to keep our environment safe they're just companies again and are hit with a small fine.
It's amazingly convenient (for the corporations at least) that they are only people when it benefits them but can drop that title easily when it makes them more money and shields those people from consequences.
> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money.
Mean or not, I'd say it's also accurate. They tried to use the IP to make money... by wringing the life out of it. There are so many Marvel/Star Wars movies/tv shows now you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track.
Bingo, I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling like I can't start in the middle and it's impossible to track back to the first story or there are just way too many so I just give up and don't watch any.
They did that with Pirates of the Caribbean first... I blinked and there were 5 of them.
> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it.
I take issue less with the volume of Star Wars and Marvel content, and more with how Disney makes small gestures toward "genre" while keeping all of that content within a tightly brand-controlled realm where there are no real stakes or diversity and everything needs to be canon. This is one of the areas where I can appreciate WB's approach more with having a variety of movies and shows with vastly different styles and audiences that obviously can't fit together in the same universe.
Are you serious? TLDR: They feel pretty different to me. SW has nowhere to go and is trying to go nowhere. Marvel continues doing its thing, within the level of competence they've always demonstrated.
I find that SW has declined to a level previously unimaginable, they are effectively stuck doing live action versions of children's animated TV shows. The mild incompetence of Clone Wars is now a distant memory, the lowest level of quality in a SW fiction project ever has been breached multiple times now by shows such as Boba Fett. The whole universe has no guiding function, expect to retcon as much as possible on top of previously very popular characters.
Marvel has ALWAYS been a milquetoast production company, with some big hits like Iron Man, Avengers films, etc. But most of their production has always been "ok", and having watched The Marvels recently, I felt like they're just going back to their Phase 1 days, where some films were good, many not really (Thor 2, Avengers 2, Iron Man 2).
BUT Marvel has a guideline for where they want to take their content, even if they just recently lost a major actor (only his own fault).
So yeah I do think there's a difference. Marvel is ok, has always been ok, with some moments of brilliance.
Star Wars was a bit all over the place but it definitely had new ideas, every single movie introduced something interesting, be it a location/planet, a character or spaceship. It didn't constantly flirt with the same recycled material ad nauseam, because its creative direction was set, even if sometimes the audience did not like the result.
Current Star Wars creative direction is nil outside of "let's find some other popular side character to wrap a show around, maybe?". There is no story line that makes any sense for the SW being produced, it's just a grab bag of "this worked I guess".
Meanwhile I loved Clone Wars & Rebels, as well as Rogue One. Thus I'm digging shows like Ahsoka & Andor. I'm less excited about the shows tied to the main movies like Boba Fett & Kenobi.
Exactly this. SW productions are side characters who had some kind of relationship with a skywalker at some point getting their own shows. The recent movie franchise didn't manage to open new directions for bigger plots that can be presented as tv shows therefore all Disney+ SW productions are stuck in the past trying to unsuccessfully expand on existing characters.
> The majority of people who buy streaming, I suspect, are interested mainly in the conveyor belt of diverse and engaging content.
I'd love to see this backed up by sources. I for one recall seeing streaming stats from Disney+ and old series like X Files are up there as some of the most streamed.
Anecdotally, I watch and rewatch a lot of old series. Like I'm rewatching Breaking Bad on Netflix right now.
> streaming stats from Disney+ and old series like X Files are up there as some of the most streamed.
This doesn't contradict OP—Disney's new content is mostly bad, so it's unsurprising that on their platform people are watching older stuff. But would that have been true of Netflix before everything fragmented? And how many people aren't on Disney+ at all because they'd prefer to see new, good content and already finished what little Disney is putting out?
Isn't Suits - a long since lapsed cable series - like the most popular thing on Netflix? So was Friends, Seinfeld, and The Office for a time too. People love to think they can generalize all streamers into a bucket when in reality it's not as simple as anyone thinks. Viewing trends change all the time and can be unpredictable, even horrible stuff gets tons of views.
Top 10 is pretty dynamic. Longest item there was there for 6 weeks and is new content. Hilariously "Fireplace 4K: Crackling Birchwood from Fireplace for Your Home" beats out Squid Game.
Ultimately yeah, it's this. Netflix wins because it understands hanging your hat on one series or IP is business suicide. They churn out a bunch of shows, from higher budget big IPs to a bunch of lower budget series and animations.
David Zaslav and other media execs wanted to try and force the old media philosophy in the streaming environment, which also meant executing a bunch of mid-budget and lower-budget series to try and save money. Except they also shot their only chance of following the actually successful model of Netflix.
Well Amazon shot many very expensive shows and they turned out to be crapola. The only thing favored Amazon studios was huge cash from Amazon so they could just be fine with all mega failures.
So far lot of streaming shows are crappy in a way I can't quite put my finger on and its definitely not just about budget.
I believe it’s the writing. There is no soul in te dialogue and characterization always seems forced. Acting and set design may be good, but it feels like no one is giving a damn about the scenario
I feel the opposite for Netflix, which has better writing but worse acting, casting, costumes and generally plastic feeling on most of its original shows.
I find most streaming shows subpar, I don’t even bother any more and just watch old series I’ve never seen like Mad Men or Beeaking bad or cheers.
We multicam sitcom is kind of awful in this regard, but at least usually it’s funny.
I think for many Netflix streaming shows it’s something with the cinematography, framing, and use of extras. I know in older movies you would get a variety of shots (through a window outside, or across a crowded room as character approaches, swooping in from above, etc) I think a lot of Netflix shows become framing shot, then “headshot to headshot” without much diversity of perspective. The also use less extra I think. I’m not sure but I think that is a factor.
Except when the "higher budget" is really just paying for an A-list actor with mediocre at best content.
There is so much of this in recent years and I think Netflix may be the biggest offender.
Yes because running NFLX, by comparison, is probably not as "fun" of a job as running a traditional media org. Imagine being in charge of IP you watched as a kid, mingling with famous actors & directors .. it's very sexy. It's a ticket to a different social life. A lot of them are larger than life personalities than come from media families.
Netflix by comparison is like running any other FAANG. Pays well, but you can live a pretty rich-but-anonymous life still. I had to look up who was running NFLX these days, and one of the co-CEOs doesn't even have a picture on his Wiki page.
I don’t think “beaming 4k video around the world” is really an issue at all.
The way the internet works, with peering etc. bandwidth is super, super cheap. It’s basically too cheap to meter. AWS bandwidth pricing has no relationship to actual bandwidth costs and never did.
Netflix has for years been operating open connect, basically they place proxy servers with ISPs (effectively a peering type arrangement). In 2021 Netflix said they spent $1B worldwide on open connect over the previous 10 years. But they spent $19B last year on “cost of revenue” which basically means content.
$20B a year on content. $0.1B a year on their CDN. I can’t imagine Disney, Comcast, etc is much different.
> I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants.
> Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has.
If it was so fundamental and obvious like you state wouldn't you have been super rich by now by buying netflix stock when it crashed in 2022. Maybe you are ?
Dominant narrative back then was that netflix is nothing specail. Building a stream app is a commodity that anyone can build and the old-world providers have content that people want to watch.
Any argument of the form “if you knew that all along you’d be rich by now from playing the stock market” is fundamentally flawed because it overlooks one of the most well known dangers of the stock market:
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”
It absolutely was obvious ahead of time that most of the competing streaming services would fail because they couldn’t possibly recreate the infrastructure of Netflix, but it was not possible to predict when they would fail.
For a concrete example, before Paramount+ launched I predicted that it would be dead in less than a year.
Clearly I was wrong because it’s still going 2 years later. I still think it will die relatively soon, but predicting exactly when is virtually impossible.
Everything was doom and gloom for Netflix as I remember it. They were wholly dependent on the licensed content that they will inevitably lose. I guess it turns out that becoming a studio is easier than becoming a streaming platform.
Either that or Netflix just did a better job than the studios did.
Just because someone was more successful with one strategy than someone else was with a different strategy doesn't mean that the strategy is superior, they could just be a better overall player or even a worse player that happened to outmaneuver a better player, or, even, in the massive multiplayer battle royale that is our economy, a worse player that made bad decisions but happened to luck into ideal market conditions.
I don't think Zoom did anything particularly revolutionary, their product just happened to be the exact right balance at the exact right time.
Netflix - The Studio is extremely sub-par, even by today's lacklustre standards. Sure, they have the occasional success; you throw enough garbage against the wall and something will stick.
It’s funny how crap the other streamers apps still are compared to Netflix.
Little things matter.
Netflix always picks up the exact second you left a show. Apple, Disney and prime sometimes jump back 5 minutes or even more.
Netflix app opens super fast even in my crap old smart TV. Apple, Disney, prime take ages. Even when open the UI is very sloppy.
Netflix adjusts the streaming quality depending on your connection. Which means things download fast / stream reliably and also presumable saves them a tonne of bandwidth.
Netflix spends a lot more on per developer, and has been working on the UI for longer: See, for instance, how a big percentage of manpower at Disney has been spent going from two completely different UIs between D+ and Hulu into a single one, so every feature didn't have to be made multiple times. Those kind of projects, with a quantity-over-quality approach to hiring, tend to take forever.
Netflix also has an advantage in cost management, also due to better engineers that are also better paid, and have been managing their system for far longer. The AWS bill for D+ is not the kind you get when you have good chances to be profitable. I bet a lot of engineering in the next year or two will be used just more efficient use of compute and storage. I bet many teams there are spending far more on servers than on people.
And if D+ could be doing better, and is still unprofitable, imagine the situation in other competitors that are even newer. The total cost of the infrastructure, without even counting the licensing or the marketing, might cost the more than people are paying.
The un-disableable auto-preview, however, is so annoying I never want to open Netflix.
What's really great is MAX.
If you've already seen an episode (rewatch or whatever) you probably didn't watch to the complete end (ie skipped the credits), especially if auto play is on. You go to watch that episode again and it drops you at the last 5-10s of the episode and you need to quickly scramble to pause-rewind back before it jumps to the next episode.
Prime never remembers when I finish an episode correctly. It’s always a few minutes from the end or even forgotten I watched it at all. It’s a mess to pick up a new season and struggle with, did I actually watch the complete last season?
Oh it's so much worse than opening speed. Paramount+ is straight unusable on every platform I tried, the Android reviews show I'm not the only one. It crashes, fails to load, kicks your dog, you name it. Can't be used.
Peacock has no way to remember I want to see my local news channel live. I have to scroll the entire list of all of the channels across the nation and find mine. It's somewhere near the bottom.
Peacock also has the problem if I pause and want to resume somewhere in the last 15 minutes of a show it'll assume I've finished it and restart. Not great when you just wanted to watch the conclusion after getting off of the treadmill. Also not great when combined with the impossible to use scrubbers, it moves far too fast to be accurate. If you get within 5 minutes of what you were aiming for, it's best to just rewatch that 5 minutes again. You can't improve on it.
I could go on for a while about these platforms, they're hot garbage.
I had this problem with Peacock when trying to rewatch the Office. I kept having to dig through their search to get to it and for some reason it wouldn't add it to my recents. In the end I bookmarked the show page and just use that.
Netflix streaming looks worst on my 150" screen. Some shows are watchables but some are simply junk bitrate wise to the point I get huge posterisation effects/pixels. The quality of the content itself is another issue.
For movies I just get the disk and store it forever with r.volution NAS(aka old zappiti NAS)
Disney has admitted they aren't trying to please Star Wars fans. Amazon has admitted they aren't trying to please Tolkien fans. Fans already consider these new developments of timeless classics to be non-canon no matter who technically owns the rights. It'll be a lesson taught in brand management for eons, until the heat death of the sun - don't acquire a property which is only valuable because of fans, just to discard the very thing that gives it value - the fans.
They truly will learn their lessons, or somebody else will.
This. I've always wondered why these companies are trying to create content for audiences that literally don't exist. It's really only shown up in the last few. years.
> Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has.
I stopped subscribing to Netflix around 2 years ago because that "sophisticated production tooling" was producing almost purely garbage tier content. With the exception of Black Mirror, there were no compelling new shows - and Black Mirror on its own was not worth the monthly subscription.
I think that part of the problem might be that streaming no longer reliably supplies the old classics. I would likely pay for a service where when someone says "You haven't seen X? It's a classic!" I could reliably watch it. However, in practice the classics are spread across so many different services that none of them are worth subscribing to.
>I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding
I love this. I am not being sarcastic but the optimistic and somewhat enthusiasm of fundamental misunderstanding.
>It’s a classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy
I am old. But it still amaze me that "strategic thinking" is such a rare skill set with top executive while high efficiency executive are in abundance.
But then I also remember for more than 10 years the media went with the idea that "execution eats strategy for breakfast."
> it still amaze me that "strategic thinking" is such a rare skill set with top executive while high efficiency executive are in abundance.
How much money did the executive make while it took years for these strategies to fail? How much will they make from the golden parachute if they're actually fired for their failures? Is that really failure, relative to the executive?
Disney really shouldn't even be included in the first sentence of this article, according to itself they have 8 million subscribers and are expecting to be profitable next year.
With a subscriber base of 8 million, assuming hypothetically that each pays $15 monthly over an entire year (a figure which is inflated), the resultant annual _revenue_ would be approximately $1.4 billion.
However, their financial losses this year have exceeded even this ($1.6 billion in first 9 months alone)
Their projection of achieving profitability in the next fiscal year seems, under these circumstances, quite optimistic :)
As of the last couple of months, much of hulu's content is available under the disney app. Seems only a matter of time before the hulu app is completely deprecated.
> and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has.
Mixing in a lot of foreign language content to make their library seem larger is a sad joke and one of the main reasons I no longer subscribe to Netflix.
Edit for clarity: I’m fine with foreign language content in general, as long as it’s categorized as such. The problem is how Netflix mixes it in with everything else in a deceptive manor.
I can remember when Blockbuster and video rental stores would put all this in a foreign language section, which was then further broken down by genre.
I guess I’m not sure how it’s deceptive? Yes, content isn’t segregated at the top level into foreign and domestic, but the original language is clearly shown and there are many country or language-specific categories too.
Maybe in Blockbuster in the US in the 1990s putting all “foreign” stuff over in its own corner made sense. But most countries didn’t do that. And content consumption has become a lot more globalized in the past decade.
For many people, easily accessing (and being recommended) interesting foreign content is one of Netflix’s selling points, I’d say.
I’m fine with foreign language content in general, as long as it’s categorized as such. The problem is how Netflix mixes it in with everything else in a deceptive manor.
What is foreign language for such a global service?
If I am in Spain, should shows in English be bundled in a "Foreign Language" along with Korean dramas, Japanese animation, and a couple of odd series in Dutch? How is this helpful?
Not saying that language categorization is a bad thing. Being able to filter shows that are available in a specific audio language, or with a specific language available for subtitles, would be a bad thing. But I seriously question the helpfulness of "English" and "Other"
I think the right approach would be to label content that is not in the source language you have set as your device locale.
It’s not about filtering out the content, it’s about making it easy to tell whether or not it’s going to start playing with dubbed audio so the viewer can make a better choice.
Locales are often compromises that don't reflect user preferences particularly well. People speak multiple languages, and they may have different preferences for content / UI languages, date/time formats etc. And the preferences may be situational, such as native X > native English > English translation/localization > X translation/localization.
Just tag the content with the relevant languages and let the user create filters based on them. And assume that the user understands that languages don't form disjoint categories, because the content itself could be multilingual.
Besides, original audio with subtitles is usually superior to dubbed audio.
Hollywood is not in the source language for most of the world. Netflix brand new English content is also not in the source language for most of the world.
Netflix started as English only and already has regional content. It would make since for foreign to be considered “not the dominant language in this region/nstion”
I'm in the US. And KDramas don't show up prominently in my recommendations (I prefer watching on KissAsian - force of habit and the subs are better).
The algo is heavily targeted to your own assumed tastes. The one time I did watch one, it was in Korean with English subs.
Maybe you watched a western marketed KDrama like Squid Games? Try watching Beyond Evil, Itaewon Class, Reply 1988, or Mr Queen and see if it reverts to English. I'm kinda curious now
That’s normal. You have to match appropriate sentence length in dubs otherwise when another person is taking the wrong person will still be talking in the dubbed language. Subtitles allow for better translation as that limitation isn’t there
Cross-country content doesn't have to mean foreign language content, right? Squid Game and Money Heist are two examples of "cross-country" content that served Netflix extremely well IMO. Produced for a specific non-anglo-centric region, they slapped shitty English dubs on those and suddenly, world-wide hits.
That’s another thing I don’t like about Netflix: English dubs by default. It’s an example of the deceptive tactics I’m referring to in how they present foreign language content.
The default audio should be in the source language, with subtitles in your language.
Unfortunately it is. If you want to listen to the original source audio with subtitles, you have to change these settings each time. It’s super annoying. (Unless something changed recently)
I’m totally with you. I still use almost exclusively Netflix but have to spend a lot more time finding content as it even seems they go out of their way to hide the fact it’s a dub in the trailers. I do a lot of backing out once I realize it’s dubbed.
Thank you, this is exactly what I was referring to. I forgot about the deceptive trailers that attempt to hide the fact it’s dubbed. There’s definitely a deliberate attempt to trick viewers here.
I think the only easy way to tell without watching is by looking at the names of the actors. If they are look like they are from a particular language/region, then it’s usually a sign it’s dubbed.
I was starting to wonder if I was alone with this opinion or if there is just a some Netflix employees here trying to gaslight me. :)
Huh? What does that have to do with anything I stated?
The same would be true if I was watching Netflix in France with my device locale set to fr-FR. I’d just consider English content to be foreign language content instead.
Why is it a problem for you? Don't like reading subs when doing stuff in the background? It's my main reason I don't like foreign, I'm either reading or watching.
I don’t like reading subtitles period (totally distracts from actually watching the movie for me) and I don’t like dubs either as the words not lining up annoys me.
Interesting to hear your comparison to Django and that you wouldn’t say they’re on par, at least for you, today. Any particular reasons for preferring Rails over Django?
I'm using both on two different customers. I have a preference for Rails.
The project structure of a Rails project is fixed and it's easy to jump into somebody's else project. The structure of a Django project is potentially pure anarchy, good luck with that.
That's mitigated by the lack of autoloading so you can learn the structure of the project by looking at the import statements at the top of the files. Unfortunately that means that you have to waste time by writing those imports. I hated that in Java even if the inevitable Java IDE added them for me.
The ORMs are more or less equivalent. I have a dislike for having to actually type the default scope (not the Django term) in Django as in
Model.objects.filter(...)
when Rails lets me type
Model.where(...)
The real time waster is the templating language which in Rails is basically Ruby and in Django is not Python. It's something else much less powerful so you have to either prepare all the data in the controller (which is called a view in Django) exactly as they'll be displayed in the page, or write a templatetag and use it to transform the data inside the page. That loses an unbelievable amount of time. If I count the cumulative hours, days, weeks spent at writing templatetags instead of a couple of Python statements I don't know whether to thank Django developers for the easy money or to roll my eyes because that time is useless.
To recap, Django wastes developer time. It's death by a thousand cuts. I'll never use it for one of my personal free time projects.
Edit: don't be too smart in Rails, that is don't build too much magic and waste the time of the next developer into a quest for finding where something really happens. Write straightforward code and if some method name is created automatically, put a comment hinting at the source.
I've worked with both for years and one thing that always bother me is implicit over explicit in RoR. It can seems easy to write code and it's faster because of that, but reading code is harder, there is too much magic. Given that we spent more time reading code than writing code I prefer the python way.
I've been a Rails dev for almost 10 years and the magic is the worst part. When something just works but I expected another hour of work, I feel like I've fallen into a trap. So, instead of just moving on, I look in the documentation for what just happened.
When you find yourself interacting with the magic parts, it is imperative that you comment what is going on so the next dev, which will probably be you, isn't also surprised.
> That's mitigated by the lack of autoloading so you can learn the structure of the project by looking at the import statements at the top of the files. Unfortunately that means that you have to waste time by writing those imports.
Although its been a while, I do remember struggling a lot with autoloading in rails for two reasons: you can't find your dependencies from the code itself and when it breaks down its quite hard to debug. Maybe things are better now with rails and when you get really proficient you know how to find where things are - however that increase the learning curve which is supposed to be a benefit with rails. With django, I can generally look at the imports to see what this module is using. With the help of the right tools I can:
- 'go to definition' of any symbol and 99% of the time land in the source, even of django itself
- automatically add imports so you don't have to write them
- automatically sort and format imports and see the unused ones
With the optional static typing that is being greatly improved with recent releases, things get even easier.
I prefer this a lot above the rails 'magic', for me it is a huge time saver because my memory is not so good, there is minimal friction moving around between code and is various dependencies to see exactly how its done. With rails I'm more often looking at the docs (not so great) or examples, with django I'm most of the time looking at the source code itself or running the shell (which is very, very good).
> Model.objects.filter(...)
Its called a manager. I understand you don't like to type 'objects', it fits in the rails culture of being allergic to redundancy, though I can't really empathize with it.
> The real time waster is the templating language which in Rails is basically Ruby and in Django is not Python.
I hate both but prefer the django template language. I'm surprised this is such a time waster for you. I think its good practice to not put too much logic in the templates so the division of labor in django is much better imo. But then again, I'm not a good frontend person and have problems with the deeply nested structures in html. Everything can help me simplify the template is a huge timesaver for me, bugs in the frontend code are terribly annoying. Honestly I hate frontend.
> Its called a manager. I understand you don't like to type 'objects', it fits in the rails culture of being allergic to redundancy, though I can't really empathize with it.
The point it that the objects method adds zero information to the statement. However it's an opportunity to add a soon to be discovered bug when Django crashes because one forgets to type .objects
They should have made filter a method of all model classes and of the models.Manager class. Same thing for all its sibling methods.
Thanks for the reply. Agreed on the templating side of things - it certainly makes building sophisticated UXs harder.
Great point around project structure and ability to move between codebases - I think the lack of enforced structure in Django absolutely helps increase codebase entropy over time.
I've worked with them both, although Rails has been a while. Some things that stand out to me:
Rails has pretty good code generation. If I want just want to get started and add a birthday field to the settings page, I can run a short one sentence command and it will go off: it will know how to do schema migration, routing, views, controller, etc. This is possible because everything is so straightfoward and consistent. I'm not saying generators are a good way to write your code, its just one example of how rails has very a high level of abstractions.
Django however has the admin. Once you have a model, it will generate a fully functional cms for it and its very tweakable. For a lot of businesses, the admin is quite servicable as a cms or administation tool, and it is a _huge_ timesaver.
I generally prefer django over rails, it just seems all much more explicit and easier to discover to me, however I do agree you can be a lot faster with rails once you learn how things fit together.
I second you on the admin and I'm sorry I forgot about it.
Rails has the optional ActiveAdmin gem but it has basically no automatic integration with the Rails app and it's not included. That means that any Django app has a basic admin and most Rails app don't have one.
To be fair, it's easy to hit the limits of those admins but by baking a user hierarchy in the main web app with a super user, you can use the standard web app for many administration tasks. If you can impersonate users (handy for debugging and you have all their data anyway) you can do a lot of things without an admin interface.
Django is great (and comparable) if you're doing just backend, or have a separate frontend/SPA.
The frontend situation in Django is terribly outdated. Just the templating system is the worst thing I've ever seen, and it doesn't even have an asset pipeline.
Agreed. I’ve had to create dedicated SPAs for several projects recently which is a huge shame. I’d be interested to understand the architectural goals of the Django project moving ahead to see if they’re even interested in solving for this type of problem.
I think any company exploring ways to improve the financial system should be given plenty of space to do so, but I think the fundamental issue facing Coinbase, and all other crypto-based firms is: when will we see mainstream adoption of crypto as something other than asset speculation?
Or, is speculation the only use-case for crypto? Sure we've had example use-cases for crypto as a value store and exchange medium, but outside the bleeding-edge of technology, and away from the VC fever dream (let alone con-artist central), where does crypto fit into society?
There are major incumbent forces all the way up to government that are keen to control the rise of this technology so it's clearly not an easy task, but for the likes of Coinbase to survive I think we need to see real value in using the things you actually trade on their exchange. Unfortunately right now it seems that Coinbase is a company predicated on the assumption that “crypto is going to become the main way to exchange value at some point in the future”.
Companies powered by hype and VC speculation invariably collapse as markets move on, so if I were investing in them I'd be really keen to have them allocate the majority of their resources at pushing crypto adoption into non-investment-based use-cases, which is to say, banks having large crypto teams is much less important than average people actively using crypto for goods and services (if that's to be the dominant use-case for crypto.)
With most technologies, I find the heuristic of "how will this technology help improve your average suburban consumer's life, or those serving them" helpful. Internet? Great. Smartphones? Yep. Electric Vehicles? Kind of.
Crypto has never had a real answer to that question. The opportunities of crypto are things like you owning your money instead of the bank, fast transaction speeds and anonymity - nobody but a tiny percentage of people give a crap about any of this. Certainly not enough to supplant the most prevalent piece of infrastructure in modern society, the fiat.
As far as I can see, the business model of cryptocurrency exchanges revolves around the speculation use-case, since they profit from matching buyers and sellers of cryptocurrencies. If cryptocurrencies worked as advertised (i.e. as a peer-to-peer payments system), I don't think there would be much use for exchanges.
Did AWS just pay them to write this? I was hoping for an interesting article exploring the complexities of a massively distributed and high-throughout system, but I just read “we connected these managed AWS services together and it’s cool”
Hopefully further instalments might actually talk about the problems they faced building this out, and their unique challenges.
This is part of their technical blog ( https://medium.com/mcdonalds-technical-blog ), which looks like an outreach attempt to help with recruitment (hackathons etc). Probably someone went to a PM saying "we need to talk about our stack, how do we make it sound sexy and cool?" and this is what they got back.
This is highly unlikely to be as simple as the author conjects, we're talking about a service that processes an enormous amount of traffic and if what the author suggests is true, would someone else not have noticed by now? It's certainly possible that different infrastructure is used by free/paid plans, and perhaps this specific site was hosted on an unhealthy instance. But we don't have any external data points here to analyse - only those reported by Cloudflare, along with anecdotal reports.
Edit: I see the title has now been changed, at least we're reducing clickbait.
I fundamentally disagree with the conclusions of this article.
It doesn't take long to "build software" - git was built in a weekend, Facebook a similar timeline. When the environment is right there's no upper bound on the pace of delivery, it's just that modern day dev is, in many places, less about quality of the output (in terms of product/market fit and user value, not code quality) and more about the satisfaction of ceremony. You couldn't product manage Google into existence, or any truly valuable piece of software, hardware, or any other innovation, but it's customary for organisations to create structures which feel grown-up in order to yield software.
The talents now required to enter the field are also different, which has naturally played a part in the perceived slow-down. Development is a new field, and research into what makes teams effective is limited - we're still using the ideas of industrial steel production to try and bolster the present manufacturing line. This means there are plenty of undesirable behaviours.
But ultimately, it's about what you're optimising for. If you hire outstanding people and give them an excellent brief, you can deliver incredible software at pace. Most modern companies don't optimise for this, it's more about satisfying sprawling teams, polishing egos, and chasing incremental gains. In that environment you can bet delivery is slow.
That's an overstatement. You can build impressive MVP and tech demos in a short amount of time, yes. But that requires that the author has already been thinking about the types of problems that come up in this domain for a long long time. Rest assured that Git certainly hasn't been created in a weekend.
Also, you can't create a product in this short amount of time. (There are some websites that do almost nothing at all, and that are very profitable, but those aren't engineering problems). Think how long git has been maintained, polished, and extended since its inception. And still people complain.
Software is a learning process, otherwise people wouldn't be so obsessed about it. And learning takes time. No matter which way you're approaching it.
I agree, saying Git was created in a weekend is like saying olympic gold medalist in 100m dash won competition in 10 seconds. Linus was working with DVCS software already and was annoyed with it so he had an idea on how to do it, he did not came up with it on Saturday like it never existed and coded it on Sunday.
Other part about Facebook - well if you take first version that was just well photos + some description and disregard all stuff that was refined next years where it started to be real product instead of novelty page for Harvard students.
In a company I work for we built first version of application in 1-2 years to catch up with what other companies already had and what customers expected. We could do really simplistic version in a weekend but no one would pay for it.
While using git as an example is a bit over simplifying I agree with the comment. Over time, if you plan ahead, your build up a set of building blocks and at some point you can put together an application very quickly. I suppose it is all relative though. While a month might seem fast to me someone else might expect a solid, fully featured application in a day or a weekend.
Fantastic work. The on-boarding is excellent and first use is very intuitive. You've done a great job of abstracting away the complexity of defining the data models so that I was able to build and deploy an example in just a few minutes.
It's a snappy admin UI and I love the auto-generating docs. All around excellent job!
I'm so glad you liked it and thank you so much for your feedback! We are working very hard to ensure that the onboarding is smooth and the learning curve flat :)
This is the typical "we didn't spend any time thinking about our architecture therefore we're going to blame our framework" article.
React is a great choice for certain use-cases, but when low-quality developers are allowed to pick it up and apply it to everything you end up in a mess. The same thing happens with literally any tool.
If you want speedy initial interaction times and manageable codebases, (and requirement X) use the right tools for the job, and instil better, thoughtful, development culture.
In general, these posts sound a bit like this: I tried jQuery, and after a while it all became a mess; took up a Backbone project, and was good for a while, but eventually it became too complex; then I worked on Angular and that seemed a big improvement, but then... and finally with React my architectures are clean.
While the reality is more like this: I had 6 months of programming experience and used jQuery and made a disaster; with 1.5 years of experience I used Backbone and I fared better; with 3 years of experience I tried Angular and I was able to build a decent size application but ultimately shot myself in the foot; and now that I have 6 years of experience my software quality has improved a lot, it must be react!
Pretty much. It's similar to discovering the power of salt and pepper in cooking. When you first use it everything tastes better. But the next step is not to increase the amounts you use in every dish, it's to explore the much wider world of cooking with herbs/spices/etc.
If your mindset is persistently "this framework/tool will solve all our problems" you're always going to have a bad time. Understanding the pros/cons of each element is essential to becoming a good developer.
It's almost like all "modern JS" are written by new programmers hired on the cheap by companies to work on their new hip UI frontends.
IMO UI is generally something new programmers like because of the visual/visceral "I built that", but once you get exposed to the sheer annoyance of UIs, programmers will migrate to backend.
So the most experienced people don't want to be constantly undercut in price by the incoming "talent", realize that WebUIs get chucked every 3-5 years anyway due to browser tech churn, and move to data monopolization.
This can be generalised to all software that is perceived to be revolutionary. Sooner or later a big company that wants to retain and attract engineering talents will arrive, with a horde or junior engineers led by an engineer looking to justify a promotion or to embellish a CV.
API generators had the same thing.
Strongloop was a decent frameworks before they started throwing 10'000 juniors to fix issues and made a mess of the codebase.
If you look at the jungle the React codebase is and you compare it with Preact (it's smart, concise and performant) you'll understand why code quality matters. And I'm not talking about stupid metrics.
The JavaScript world changes so fast that no one is ever going to be very experienced in the the they are using. I imagine that is partially to blame for all the crap we see in the front end.
I agree, the JS ecosystem is reflective of constant new programmers redoing the UI every couple years, although I need to grit my teeth and admit that React did at least standardize/structure the ecosystem for the last few years.
I’d just like to expand on this, as I think it’s a great comparison!
Carefully picking tools is important, but also, don’t adopt more tools than you need to.
One common example I have seen is pulling in a CSS-in-JS library to do something that SASS can easily do... when SASS is already incorporated into the build process.
SASS offers a fairly complex set of features if you care to learn about them, and the module system (in development) is going to solve @import global scoping issues very elegantly.
If you need something much less complex than Sass, but has a similar syntax to Sass (not SCSS), PostCSS + SugarSS has been nice for me. I really prefer indented syntax, and ever since CSS variables became readily available on my project support requirements, there's not been much reason to reach for Sass. A lot of people seem to point to the color functions, but I don't think a lot of people noticed Sass and Less don't do color mixing/darkening properly (they don't square the gamma before doing operations) so I wouldn't advise using these built-ins anyhow.
I would change it a bit and suggest that after angular, they did react, and after 18 months of that it was too convoluted, but 'hooks' solved everything, and then 12-18 months after that, things are just way too complex, and they're now investigating svelte or something else.
I rarely see any decent architecture survive growth and real world use beyond a couple years. It's usually either 1) "no one could possibly have foreseen this new use case/requirement" (from less experienced folks) or 2) "YAGNI!" when trying to build in some abstraction levels to handle use cases you know will happen down the road.
In reality these often become the scapegoat for a need to refactor. I know refactor is a four letter word to some, but the truth is we grow as developers and architects and learn from our mistakes.
There's a tendency to blame the tools. You can build a big, high quality app in almost any language and framework.
I disagree with the reality you present. There are a lot of people, myself included, with a considerable amount of experience who found that maintaining jQuery/Backbone code to be complex and error-prone and React presented a solution to this problem with a programming model that looks more like an immediate mode GUI (even though it ultimately paints to a retained mode DOM).
I don't think it's worthwhile to minimize the actual, useful impact React has had for web apps.
React has been god sent for us as we slowly modernise an application that is a mess of server rendered html and hacked together frontend code.
Slowly we are rewriting individual pieces as embedded React components (no SPA here) and moving to a proper API layer that the components talk to. The separation of concern has made it a loot easier to increase code coverage and ensure a controlled rollout of new features.
We also just bit the bullet and paid for syncfusion to use on our frontend to avoid reinventing the wheel for a lot of the functionality we need.
> The separation of concern has made it a loot easier to increase code coverage and ensure a controlled rollout of new features.
This can be achieved (and more easily) by separating your templating from your business logic at the package level. If you know what you're doing you can keep things separate and your import graph non-cyclical, if you don't know what you're doing you're going to recreate the mess in your components and API anyway.
Source: Tired of seeing this happen again and again and again and again. And fixing it.
Everything done badly of course causes the same effect. But we are dealing with a massive mess that is the worst case of both worlds.
Since we need to also provide an API going forward to our clients, for our usecase this was a great solution. However we are not doing an SPA, the main framework and navigation is still server driven. The difference is that the "create new user dialog" is now a react component that calls the corresponding api.
Running through the API also makes it easier for us to handle the caching of data at that layer instead of a mix of jquery calls and random div HTML generation.
Honest question. As someone whose only worked with open source tech in React such as Bootstrap, Semantic UI, Material UI, etc, what is the advantage of a paid UI framework like this?
Maybe stability? Besides Semantic UI I found that other frameworks are nowhere near as mature. I guess if you're a big company its a small price to pay but it also seems like you're paying a grand + per month for something with tons of free alternatives.
You're paying for the support you need when your developer can't fit requirement X into the component, or when they run into a bug, or whatever other reason.
700 usd a year for the library for a developer. It saves us a ton of time as its a B2B business and we use a lot of stuff like a calendar view, gantt diagrams and scheduling. Rewriting it from scratch of adapting a random set of components would be more expensive in time and resources.
IMO it’s unfair to blame “low quality developers”. The industry has coalesced around React as the one stop answer to everything. Coding boot camps focus on it to the detriment of broader web technologies. It’s worth calling out when it actually fit a use case.
Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay. But the IP dilution and very real costs of beaming 4K video around the world on demand don’t mix well together.
Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has.
It’s a classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy - so they abandon their sublet and try to build a mall from scratch - the models are vastly different, and perhaps in this case, lethal.