[jonplackett]

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.

An then they actually have good content too…

[ta_1138]

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.

[cpuguy83]

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.

[upon_drumhead]

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?

[mrj]

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.

[nebula8804]

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.

[thefounder]

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)

[cpuguy83]

4K at 150" would look like crap. Do any streaming services support 8K? That is a lot of bandwidth and decode overhead.

[BobaFloutist]

>4K at 150" would look like crap

I mean it would really depend how close you're sitting to the screen, wouldn't it?

[cpuguy83]

The parent post said it looks pixelated. So, yes distance matters but is not relevant to my post because they already said it looks bad.

[gardenhedge]

Netflix buffers more for me and quality is awful for up to 20 seconds, I like the small jump back on Disney+ when resuming