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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Completely agree, I think one great thing that Netflix has done over the other competitors is that they're a tech company at heart, not a content company.
As such, they thought about how to optimize cost and quality of delivery much more than HBO (and others) did/do. This is both a good thing for their bottom line, but also for consumers. I find Netflix loads significantly faster than other competitors, even Prime video which has the backbone of AWS behind it!
Sure, at the end of the day the most compelling content wins, but after that, quality of service is super important.
Netflix is over engineered to a crazy extent, which makes it an incredibly good user experience. They’re often pointed to as an example of resiliency and reliability in the tech circles I’m in, and it proves very true. There’s almost no cases where I can think of Netflix being down, let alone down because of issues with their own platform.
Being a bit pedantic, but if it leads to the desired UX I wouldn't call it over-engineering
I can honestly say all of the big services have been reliable and of similar quality. Max, Peacock, Hulu, Prime, Discovery, Netflix, AppleTV.
Never a problem. The one exception was Game of Thrones era HBO.
That's surprising to hear. Netflix has always been a step above, Hulu is decently behind. The rest are pretty rough from my perspective, but slowly getting better over time. Amazon was definitely miserable to use for a long time and I don't think had anything but a basic "fast-forward/rewind" functionality with no thumbnails for quite a while.
The Peacock app and streaming has been hit or miss on plenty of occasions.
I think the worse is the Disney app that makes it difficult to just replay a movie that's already been watched. It likes to resume at the end of the credits of the episode you want to watch rather than realize I want to watch the whole episode not just the final 10 seconds of credits. Or that switching between an episode when watching something from your "Previously Watched" list means finding the series on an entirely separate list in the UI.
Amazon video is fucking awful. I don't know how anyone could defend their player. It's slow, clunky, missing features, and hard to navigate. Their libraries are pretty bad too. And load times are significantly worse than Netflix. It's like twitch vs YouTube.
Disney was somewhere between the two in my experience. But lots of problems trying to re-watch things or find my place.... It always seemed to recommend the wrong episode of the show I wanted etc. It just always felt it had a small hurdle, whereas Netflix is always one click away from what I'm looking for.
And then there’s the other issue: experiences vary wildly depending on device the service is being played from. Playing something on a Roku vs AppleTV vs even a PS5 will give you different experiences. Even through Netflix, who is probably at the top for UX/UI, some features of the software are missing device by device, UI differences, etc.