Greg PierceRE: https://mastodon.social/@daringfireball/116309404063715397
This is a bad take. Apple exerting control over what UI conventions are allowed, or even required, would be disastrous. I dont think you can carve out a special case for video players.
Jimmy@agiletortoise As a person who works on a pretty popular non-standard streaming app for AppleTV, I can confidently say there are dozens of reasons to not support Apple's native video player. Top of the list:
- Ads. Streaming services live and die by ads (like it or not), and the built-in player has very rudimentary ad-insertion options, and no options for interactive ads, pause-screen ads, or overlay banner ads (i know, they all suck - but they pay the bills)
- playback enhancements like custom scrubber thumbnails and chapter marks
- personalized "next episode” and autoplay logic
- enhanced closed caption rendering (fonts, styling, placement- CEA 708 is fine, but an old standard)
- proprietary accessibility audio description triggers
- Non FairPlay DRM
- Dynamic forensic watermarking
- Device concurrency limits (i.e. "only 2 screens on Netflix”)
- Playback telemetry
- Custom dynamic bit rate logic (ours is frankly better than Apple’s, and I bet Netflix's is even more tuned)
- Cross platform consistency (we have the exact same video player on iOS, Android, Web, AppleTV, GoogleTV, and most smart tvs)
- Branding - AppleTV already has people skip the app mostly from the “Next Up" row in the TV App or home screen. The player is the branding these days.
- Eliminates dependency on Apple, and waiting for the yearly update cycle to add any new features (if any) to the player.
John Gruber@jimmylittle @agiletortoise Why would any user care about this:
- Cross platform consistency (we have the exact same video player on iOS, Android, Web, AppleTV, GoogleTV, and most smart tvs)
From a user's perspective, the only consistency that matters is on the device itself. It's no different from wanting idiomatic Mac apps, not apps that work exactly the same as they do on Windows and Linux.
@gruber @jimmylittle In this specific case, I would argue that, for the vast majority of users, Apple is not the platform here – Netflix is. Most of those users would rather the consistency be that Netflix works the same on all their devices, not that the video player works the same across services.
Even the Apple TV owners, who likely also have a second TV in bedroom or something that does not also have an Apple TV connected.
John Payne 
@agiletortoise @gruber @jimmylittle are you saying that I'm the weird one that has an Apple TV on _every_ TV in my possession? (Even the tailgate TV although I did use the TV's peacock app last time)
@agiletortoise @jimmylittle That to me is exactly the same argument behind, say, Microsoft Word 6.0 for Mac being just like the Windows version.
Mike Sax@gruber @agiletortoise @jimmylittle Which is exactly the same argument as Native vs. Electron apps. It’s Horizontal vs. Vertical consistency. (perf and memory aside)
@gruber @jimmylittle Maybe a bit. In the same sense your argument is “every word processor should be TextEdit” because the platform provided that standard.
@agiletortoise @jimmylittle Netflix is so dominant that there probably are some Apple TV users who effectively use Netflix all or most of the time, but I'm sure most people who only or mostly use Netflix also use whatever is built into their TV or the cheapest streaming stick/box they can find. The whole point of Apple TV is the tvOS experience.
Sander@gruber @agiletortoise @jimmylittle
Exactly! Such a curated experience, with the MLB+ parading in the main menu. I’m sure there are dozens! of us outside the us not caring about it. Also Apple TV is an amalgam of Apple TV content and other apps content, so you are never quite sure where you are. Such consistency. Let’s not talk about search.
The good news is that after the latest Netflix update one can watch end credits. I haven’t encountered this as a possibility in AppleTV Netflix app before.
Exactly! Such a curated experience, with the MLB+ parading in the main menu. I’m sure there are dozens! of us outside the us not caring about it. Also Apple TV is an amalgam of Apple TV content and other apps content, so you are never quite sure where you are. Such consistency. Let’s not talk about search.
The good news is that after the latest Netflix update one can watch end credits. I haven’t encountered this as a possibility in AppleTV Netflix app before.
Dayton Lowell@agiletortoise @gruber @jimmylittle These different devices may not even have the same primary input device(mouse, touch, remote, etc.)
@gruber @agiletortoise Cross platform consistency is a balancing act, for sure. Is it bad that Disney+ works differently than Netflix on AppleTV? Yes.
Is it bad if Disney+ works differently on your smart tv than it does on your Android phone? Also yes, but yes×10.
We've found that users aren't as dedicated to their operating system as they are to their apps. Notion or Slack work the same wherever you use them - that's a feature. The "platform" is Netflix or Disney+ or Slack, not iOS or tvOS or Android. People want Disney+ to work the same on their AppleTV and their neighbor's Roku and their parent's LG TV.
As a 20+ year Mac user I don't like it at all, but our surveys and research prove that what I want is not what 80% of other people want.
@jimmylittle @agiletortoise That's why Apple should enforce this at the App Store review level.
@gruber @agiletortoise Forcing users to adapt to arbitrary platform standards has never really worked out well.
Imagine a world where every app on your phone was forced to adopt semi-transparent search fields where you could see the text on the layer behind it as it scrolled by, making the entire UI virtually unreadable.
Oh, wait... 😉
Dave Murdock@jimmylittle @gruber @agiletortoise I really wish video player developers could understand users care the most that video apps work the same on the same device, and very little across devices. If an app customizes the player, don’t break or subtract features users rely on (e.g. 10 second skip back, what did he say?, scrubbing, enhanced dialog). An Android app video player can’t work like an Apple TV video player because of the Apple TV remote.
Robert@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] The problem with enforcing the use of Apple's player means you are limited by their formats. This was a big deal with players for TV tuners: in the US broadcast TV is MPEG-2 in a TS container, a format that Apple's player does not support.
Consistency is nice. But functionality is important, too. If Apple forced their player on everyone, then I couldn't use my Apple TV to stream from my network tuner.
(I already feel that forcing web browsers to use their rendering engine is a step too far; extending the same control over media playback reeks of the same over-bearing control.)
Consistency is nice. But functionality is important, too. If Apple forced their player on everyone, then I couldn't use my Apple TV to stream from my network tuner.
(I already feel that forcing web browsers to use their rendering engine is a step too far; extending the same control over media playback reeks of the same over-bearing control.)
@jimmylittle @agiletortoise Since when have user surveys dictated good product design? Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
@jimmylittle @agiletortoise If I watch TV at my neighbor's I let my neighbor run the remote control. If someone visiting my house took the remote I'd be put off. And if they were confused using an app on my Apple TV because it used the tvOS video player, I'd suggest they give me my remote control. (And question why I invited someone so rude and dimwitted to visit.)
@jimmylittle @agiletortoise Your argument implies that someone who uses Netflix on Apple TV is more likely to care about using Netflix on *someone else's TV* than they are about consistency with the other apps on their own Apple TV. I don't know a single person like that.
@gruber @jimmylittle Regardless of whether the new Netflix player is a disaster (it is), my original point was that it would be worse for Apple to mandate a player. I rather suspect some of the features of the now quite capable Apple player would not exist if they had not had competition and experimentation from other apps. If people are cancelling Netflix over it (which I doubt is happening in quantity), then that is where the pressure to return to the system player should come from – not Apple
@agiletortoise @jimmylittle They don't have to require use of the system player, but they should require that custom players support most, if not all, of the standard UI features of the system player.
@gruber @agiletortoise Yes!
regardless of the custom player, there should be (IMO…)
- easy access to captions, enhanced dialog, alternate audio tracks, etc.
- standardized scrubbing controls (even in custom scrubbers), including support for click- and touchwheel- based navigation
- full parity in remote functions (like Siri access and skip-back with captions)
- full accessibility controls and settings
But in exchange, Apple needs to support custom implementations of things like alternate scrubbing thumbnails, custom next episode countdowns, pause-screen overlays, and other basic features that all the big streamers require in their apps.
David Roth@agiletortoise @gruber @jimmylittle Almost no one ever cancels Netflix. They’ve figured that out, and it is the root of their massive enshitification the last several years.
@gruber @agiletortoise Not everyone is a single-device user, but lots of people are single-app users.
In my house, we have a couple of AppleTVs, a RokuTV, and a FireTV.
When my son watches YouTube, he doesn’t care whether he’s on his iPad, on the living room TV, my office TV, or his bedroom computer monitor. He just wants YouTube to work like YouTube wherever he watches it.
@gruber @agiletortoise And I want to be clear - I’d personally much prefer everyone just use the AppleTV player, but 10 years working in streaming has shown me that neither the industry nor the users really care. They just want their shit to work the way they need it to. (And Netflix utterly failed in their redesign)
Paul McGrane@gruber @jimmylittle @agiletortoise When I play video on my iPad it is in PiP mode while I use a different app. Even there, some of the services work a lot better than others! (Hulu works well, most of the rest don’t)