Horrendous quality issues I've seen:
* Deliberately not reusing rendered Activities (e.g. hitting the back button re-draws and re-requests content with painful latency).
* Not cleaning up Ads resources when the ad terminates, so playback drops frames and audio
* Not minding viewed ads, so viewers are punished with duplicate ads plays if they close or skip by accident (Netflix is mindful of this)
* exhausting massive memory -- clear memory leaks and waste
* humiliating UIs for search , playback , scrubbing , etc
* audio/video streams out of sync (e.g. Hulu trailers)
Sure teams are time and budget constrained I get that. But I'm curious about actual stories of corner cutting leading to such painful UIs. It's especially bizarre given that people pay a monthly subscription, so c-sat is rather important.
Known violators are : Kanopy (which bills Public Libraries a hefty subscription), Peacock , HboMax and nearly every other streaming app.
Netflix and Amazon prime are better about performance.
You are missing a key aspect of what is going on. People buy streaming services based on the content, not the app. People will complain about the app, put bad reviews up, and still pay their monthly fee, which is better for the business than having zero tech complaints and cancelling because the content sucks.
This is true for nearly any business until the scales tip in the other direction.
"People come to mcdonalds for the burgers not the bathrooms" until eventually enough pain points (bathrooms, service, punctuality, traffic etc) make them stop coming
The Roku Channel used to be really bad at this; I had a bad experience over a year ago and avoided it until recently as they carry a show I was watching that left another platform in the past couple months and it's good at this now.
Of course, it still has the basic issues that make me skip back after ad breaks frequently. a) they consistently insert ads slightly offset of the intended insertion points; b) the ad has different audio/video/hdcp properties than the content its inserted into, so my receiver (and sometimes my tv) blanks audio to resync when the content resumes.
I'm not thrilled that Amazon added ads into their streaming product, but at least the insertions are well timed and I don't recall audio dropouts when content is resumed (but maybe I missed it).
Netflix has co-CEOs. One for tech and one for content. They value both equally
Amazon is a tech company and pays their software developers tech company wages.
The rest are media businesses. HBOMax specifically are owned by Discovery who has always been interested in doing things as cheaply as possible.
While Disney/Hulu are also on the surface media companies. Disney bought BamTech who had the best streaming technology/people outside of Netflix and Disney has always cared about technology
But why for everything that is holy are you watching the ad tier of streaming services?
all the other ads tiers are pretty painful. but none are as bad as broadcast TV.
I don't watch streaming a lot, and the Ads tiers are a great way to use the service for a month or two until I tire.
The ads are repetitive usually drugs or snacks so they are easy to tune out.
Content is mostly what matters.