How Important Is Instant

September 27, 2019
2 min read

As every company in the world and then some think that creating streaming service is easy you just need some content, I think they forget a couple of very important aspects of the successful service that are not trivial to implement.

The human brain perceives anything less than 250 milliseconds as instant. So when making Spotify, the CEO and founder Daniel Ek wanted the service to feel instant to make an illusion that every single song is right there on the users hard drive.

“We spent an insane amount of time focusing on latency when no

one cared because we were hell bent on making it feel like you had all

the world’s music on your hard drive. Obsessing over small details can

sometimes make all the difference. That’s what I believe is the biggest

misunderstanding about the minimum viable product concept. That is the V

in the MVP.” – Daniel Ek

When creating Evernote, Libin believed that responsiveness is crucial to the app experience and there couldn’t be any delay between searching for something and results popping up, so Evernote stored everything locally on the hard drive (although it was a right incentive, the implementation was bad, but it is different point).

The same point goes for Netflix, you’ve probably experienced it, when you start watching a movie or a TV show, press play and it starts playing immediately. Especially if it is something new and popular. That is because Netflix partners with ISPs and deploys appliances with the most popular content right to them, that way, when you are watching the newest Netflix original that Netflix heavily pushes, you might be streaming it not from Netflix itself, but from your ISP. And by the way, Netflix doesn’t charge the IPSs at all, so they have only technical or legal requirements to fill.

That is why Netflix has a big advantage over other streaming services, this is an expertise you gather over the years and understanding of your customers, you get only by collecting watching data. That way Netflix can predict what will people in certain regions watch and preload the appliances with the most relevant content.

You may not even realize, but you notice little hiccups in the apps you use, the instant is very important in the user experience.

Spotify Now Requiring Users to Share Location Data to Prevent Abuse of Family Plan

September 16, 2019
2 min read

As spotted by CNET, Spotify updated its terms and conditions for Premium Family subscribers, where it now says, that users have to provide location data “from time to time” to ensure that plan members are actually living at the same address.

What is interesting, Spotify tried to do the same thing one year ago, but was met with such a backlash that it had to stop, until now, when they just added this to the terms and conditions.

Although in the description of the Family plan it specifies that plan members should be ‘members of the same household’, people take the name of the plan quite literally and point out that it is not a prerequisite for being a family to live under the same roof.

This is one of those things, where legitimate users have to suffer because of the abusers. In the reports about the news it is mentioned that friends use the feature to pay less ($15 per month divided by six users is just $2.50), but groups all over the internet and social networks are full of messages where people are looking for “family members” to share the plan with. Most of them don’t even know each other.

Still, even if I understand what Spotify tries to prevent, this is the reason to leave the service. Today location data is a king and providing it to the music service is just stupid. Sure they say that they will delete location data right away, but who believes them anymore? The price of not deleting and apologizing later is much lower than what they can get selling or using the data.

I’ve been thinking recently about switching as everyone is so positive about recommendation engine (didn’t work for me previously), but after that I’m definitely staying on Apple Music with my Family Plan.