This is a really really bad idea. Don't break backwards compat. for 20% of gains. Internet connection speeds and storage capacities only go up. In a few years time, 20% of gains will seem crazy to have broken back-compat for.
I wanted to re-watch this on Netflix but it seems they removed it some time ago and have no plans to bring it back. It seems the interactivity features were obsoleted from their app platform as they were hard to support?
But surely Netflix could have setup 1 to 3 of the "best" variants of the Bandersnatch and let people watch those? Even a "directors cut" based on how the director chose the path, would suffice.
The content is entirely gone right now. Which is pretty tragic as it was excellent.
It's a pity Brooker didn't have some residual IP control so it could have been republished elsewhere. I honestly think it was a little masterpiece that deserved to be saved.
I am not an expert but as long as the video is playable by the browser (x264 - Chrome apparently supports the most formats) and the same duration (05:12:14) it should work.
That was a standalone piece though, rather than some sort of trend. The choose-your-own nature of it was integral to the story and referential to the contemporary books which were CYO.
Your theory fits fine with “We’re not going to make a series like this or turn it into a genre”, but not so well with “we already made this thing and it was really popular, but we’ve decided to take it off the platform”
My kid loved that interactive Bear Grylls stuff, still talks about it sometimes (what his wrong choices were etc.) Sometimes I think they kill this stuff before it get mainstream. Also, some way to control via the TV, or Chromecast may have made this more popular.
I remember Bear Grills "You vs. Wild" as one of the most well-known interactive shows. It's strange it's never mentioned in articles about interactive Netflix features.
It makes no sense to me at all. If they don't want to support interactivity features in their overall Netflix.com front-end, they should release a separate app.
They're still trying to get into video games—they just bought the rights to FIFA, for goodness sakes—so they should make use of their ready-made content.
There is no way the actual code for selecting choices is particularly complicated. Maybe as part of a larger codebase it could become tech debt, but on its own?
A separate app would be a lot more work. Not only do you need to publish separate apps on all of the platforms you still need to maintain that separate app (even if it's 100% locked to bug and security patching).
If I were to guess, it had less to do with being "too difficult" and more to do with "not being worth it". I.e. they have the numbers for how many people were watching the limited interactive content from years ago, they know whether they plan on having more interactive video content, and they know how much it is to maintain across different apps (and likely don't want to fragment their service availability to support something they identify as a declining niche). Just because they may be getting into games does not mean it makes sense to have support for other interactive stuff people hardly ever watch.
They tried something different, it didn't work out to be popular enough to bother with for the rest of time, and they moved on.
> If I were to guess, it had less to do with being "too difficult" and more to do with "not being worth it"
That's what I mean, too difficult for the expected return.
> A separate app would be a lot more work. Not only do you need to publish separate apps on all of the platforms you still need to maintain that separate app
We're talking about, what, Android and iOS? Those are the only platforms where Netflix has been publishing games AFAIK. I'm not suggesting they maintain it on every platform with a Netflix app!
I just don't believe it would be much work. If it's an app, it doesn't even have to handle streaming, it can just play the local video file. Heck, we have a fan-made codebase we can use as a reference:
<500 lines of code, plus two json files which are admittedly much longer but look auto-generated. I assume they came from Netflix, which means they exist already.
Even acknowledging that an official version might necessitate more than this, it just shouldn't be a big lift, even relative to a very small number of users. If it is a big lift, then something else is very wrong inside Netflix.
Netflix must have spent millions of dollars producing Bandersnatch. It was critically acclaimed. I can understand not making more—but not doing a modicum of work to keep it in their catalog?
Probably couldn't find anyone willing to put their job on the line to maintain it. Netflix culture is big on chasing "impact" and other subjective metrics. Putting your hand up to maintain legacy only used by a small group of users is a good way to get yourself absolutely slaughtered even if the thing was liked. IIRC they had a sports quote which summarizes this better.
Regardless of whether he was grifting or not, he still didn't deserve what happened to him. Nobody apart from serious criminals or warlords deserve that. He was neither.
Why not just embarrass him in a viral stunt. Nobody even tried to do that. They leaped all the way from 0 to 11 by shooting him dead.
Who is to say they were mentally ill? Major left wing streamers openly were calling for violence before it happened. TechDirt's position conveniently ignores this. Kirk being a charlatan, even if that were true, is small potatoes.
Look, i checked the first 20 seconds, it's called a "spun metaphor", even if poorly done. Basically, this guy (with a grating voice tbh), calls democrats to "show some gut" then "you need to be gutting them" and "shank them and let their intestine drop on stage".
It's obviously cut to look inflamatory, but be honest, do you really think he calls for democrats to _literally_ gut republicans? Or, and i don't know about eitehr this long-hair guy or the context, he was talking about a US debate democrats just lost because they showed no heart and refused to reach for the jugular after a successful initial attack, on a debate show?
Because, and again, not a native speaker, not from the US, don't know about it, i might be too charitable, it looks to be to be missing a lot of context. Was it recent? was it during the election cycle? To me its very, very suspicious that an editing like this comes out just now, it seems like a hit job.
There's quite a lot of housing just outside the City boundary in Shoreditch and Farringdon, the latter being easily comparable to Barbican as it's the next stop on the tube.
I wondered the same. Those code examples took an hour or so to figure out. It's a very basic exercise, sending an HTTP request, but doing it in nine languages, the majority of which you've never used, requires a little research. The llm can generate them all, but I had to run them locally to make sure they worked, and they oftentimes didn't. Most of them were easy and only took a minute or two to figure out, but after an hour and a half I gave up on Java. I literally could not figure it out. I'm sure I could have if I went long enough, but at some point you just have to cut your losses and decide it's not worth your time. This was not going to make or break my product offering, I'm not trying to learn Java, and I just wasn't interested in spending more time trying to figure it out. The llm was happy to generate examples, but they didn't work.
I've been visiting China every 1 to 3 years since 2014 and definitely in the last 4 years, on multiple visits, I've noticed that pollution is visibly lower. You can actually see the blue of the sky on most days. Everyone has noticed it. It's a massive change.
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