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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.