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.
@agiletortoise @jimmylittle That to me is exactly the same argument behind, say, Microsoft Word 6.0 for Mac being just like the Windows version.
@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.