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Ask HN: Why are streaming apps so bad (insiders only)?

tonymet Thursday, December 04, 2025

A sincere question to the many actual & former employees on this forum. And before you get suspicious, yes I understand TVs are underpowered. There are still great streaming apps which perform adequately.

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.

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