 I mean, I honestly, it's so bad. I don't even know if I can just be a designer anymore. I think I'm just gonna have to quit. It's the product, sorry man, I'm out. I can't do this anymore. I really don't like this world. Oh God. So I've just been using the worst product. I think it's the worst thing I've used in the last 10 years. And in this video, I'm gonna break down what makes it so shit. You can beat the shit. The clip you're about to hear is from the Product Breakfast Club podcast, a podcast I run with Jake Knapp every Monday morning for like the last two years. And we try to find some of the most interesting clips for YouTube that you might wanna listen to. So what you're gonna hear is me talking about a product that has just gotten me so sad over the last few weeks. I break down why I think this product is so terrible and what it means for the industry. I hope you like it. If you've used the product that I'm talking about, do let me know in the comments and I wanna know in the comments what's the worst product you've used in the last 10 years. I really wanna know that. This one's really gotten me down. I'm just feeling really off about this. I hope you enjoy it. So Chernobyl, I wanna watch it because everyone was telling me about it. And also here's the thing, I wanted to watch Game of Thrones legally. And the only way I could watch Game of Thrones legally was iTunes. So I bought the season pass on iTunes. And then one of my colleagues bought a subscription to something called Sky Ticket. Now Sky Ticket is basically the European HBO, I guess, in terms of quality. Although I don't know if they really make a lot of their own shows. A lot of the shows are just playing HBO shows here in Europe. So if you wanna watch HBO shows in Europe legally, you have to get Sky Ticket. Okay, so what's the difference between Sky Ticket and iTunes when it came to Game of Thrones? Well, Sky Ticket was playing Game of Thrones on Monday and iTunes was playing it on Tuesday. And that was fine until the finale. But for the finale, I really wanted to watch it right when it came out. So what I did is I went and got myself a Sky Ticket subscription for one month. And then I said, I'll just cancel it. Just watch the last episode. So I watched the last episode on Sky Ticket. It was actually, this was the early stages of realizing, okay, this is a strange product, right? It's basically Netflix, Sky Ticket, just to give you an idea. You pay a monthly fee. There's like a web app slash native app version that you can watch on your laptop. And then there's an iPad and iPhone app that you can use to watch stuff. And what I started to notice very quickly was the product itself was absolute dog. Now the content was great. The Game of Thrones episode I watched that and I realized there's some amazing shows on Sky Ticket and Chernobyl was the next thing I started watching. But this fucking Sky Ticket product, the digital product itself, is the worst digital product I've used in, I can't remember something that I've used that was worse than Sky Ticket. It literally does everything wrong. It's 2019 and most digital products at this point are fine. So for example, like Prime Video, it's not great, but it's, you can use it, right? Most products today are either pretty good. Netflix is a pretty good digital product. It works really well on all the different platforms. And then you have something like Amazon Prime Video or Prime, what it's even called Prime Now or something. No, Amazon Prime, whatever. And that's fine. That's kind of like the lower end. There's no frills. It's just like stuff that you click on and watch stuff and it's kind of crappy. But Sky Ticket manages to be literally just the biggest piece of shit I've ever used in my life. Everything is broken. Every part of it sucks. And I'm just blown away that there's a product that has such excellent content that I want to watch. I want to pay sky for this, but I can't. Couple of examples of what happens. So trying to watch it on the PS4. So PS4, PlayStation 4 is where I watch all of my different products like Netflix or YouTube or I basically have all of them because I want to have access to all the shows. And they all work fine. You know, the PS4 is not a great way to use these things, but they work fine. Sky Ticket, for watching that last Game of Thrones episode, it crashed like three times. Then I was able to watch maybe half of an episode of Chernobyl and then it just stopped working. Contacted support. They told me I should use a LAN cable. And I was like, I don't use a LAN cable for anything else in my apartment. Also, I don't have a fucking LAN cable. And I also got a bit annoyed and I was like, come on, it's 2019. And their reply was, yes, it's 2019. You need a LAN cable. So great support there from Sky Ticket. Really, really fantastic. I still decided because I wanted the content. I also wanted Westworld. I still decided, fuck it, you know what? I'll keep using the product. Maybe it's better on the iPad. So I got the iPad out, downloaded Sky Ticket and it was working actually. So on iPad it was actually playing the episodes. Now one thing that Sky Ticket does is it doesn't remember the language or any of the settings. You know, if you finish watching something then you close it, then you open it again every single time. Maybe besides once I've had to actually reset the language I was watching it in. This is unbelievable. I'm not even mentioning right now the fact that just playing shows and just using the interfaces, dog. I can mostly get over that but just like so many weird choices. For example, when you wanna watch something on the web version, you have to download a native app and the web version is just a launcher for the videos playing in the native app on your Mac. And this is just already one step where shit can break. So when I was using my Mac connected to my TV, so yeah, first of all, PS4 just didn't work. I had to give up on it and stop playing video. Then I went to the iPad, plugged the iPad into the TV and they had created a special screen so they've obviously worked on this that says you cannot use an external display with SkyTicket. So I was like, okay, great, that's perfect. So I'll try my laptop. So plugged in my laptop, brought it up on screen, press play and of course, trying to get through the nightmare interface on web and then playing it on the native interface. And if you make a mistake, you have to go back to the web interface. It's really, really great. And what was happening is that the sound was only coming out of my Mac and I've heard this now, looking at a lot of the forums online, this seems to be a general problem. So I couldn't get the sound for SkyTicket to come out of my fucking TV and everything else was working fine, just not SkyTicket. You can tell this has really scarred me. I also have a point, I'm going somewhere with this. It made me think a lot about product design and what I want to get through this story here. So in the end, what I did was I canceled my SkyTicket account. I was like, this shit. And I ended up just not watching stuff anymore, the stuff that I wanted to. I did finish Chernobyl. It was an absolute nightmare to get every episode working. They also kept crashing the whole time. Most of the episodes we just had to watch on my iPad and it was still good. Talking to some other people and they were like, oh, I've got this great link to a stream. And I was like, no, I want to pay for it. But actually in this case, the stream, even with all the ads and everything, not telling you I watched a stream or anything, but even with all the ads, it's better than SkyTicket. Now, here's the thing. There's a lot of very unique choices that the product team at Sky would have to have made to make this product so specifically bad. And what I was thinking about while I was using it is, this is a case where I would have been 100% fine if they had just 100% cloned Netflix from like three years ago and just left it like that and just got those basics right of, for example, playing video or not having like an external native app to kind of check that you're using the right version. I have no idea. And you also have to enter your pin code every time you open up the Sky app. You're this like child or whatever it's called, like, yeah, to make sure you're over 18 or whatever. Even if you turn it off and say, you don't want to do that, it doesn't work. It just keeps coming back up. So I was thinking like, here's a case where the content is so good. The content is excellent on Sky Ticket. It's better. It is much better than Netflix. It's much better than Amazon Prime Video. You know, these relatively cheap shows that are on there. Me personally, I think Netflix, you know, it's very hit or miss. Whereas on Sky Ticket, the shows were really great. I guess they wanted not to just have like a direct copy of the other competitors, but they should have. This is a case where design was not important. Getting the absolute basics right was important. I want to know what happened inside the company that this happened. I want it, maybe it was a white label off the shelf, video player system that they use that just sucks. Or maybe what I suspect, this is something that a lot of companies have trouble with. This is not me shitting on Sky, except for that product sucks. And I've canceled my subscription just because it's such a bad product, which is something I haven't done in years. I really just think maybe it's not a company that is very strong when it comes to the tech or the product design. And because of that, their products are pretty buggy. The reviews on the app stores are disgraceful. It's like one and two stars on both the iOS and Android stores. So these products are objectively terrible. But I do think a company like that is in an interesting position where they're probably trying to build the internal capabilities to make these products, but they're just not able, the culture of product in this company is not strong enough to be able to pull it off. You can just tell every interaction you have with this product is terrible. It's really horrible product. And when I see something like this, I really wish that a company like that could almost just like admit, okay, look, it's unlikely that we're gonna be able to build a kick-ass product team over the next few years. It's just not part of our culture. We're not a tech company. We're a work excellent content company. And maybe someone else can build the tech or maybe we just have to put a lot of effort into building this team, this tech team. But I feel like what happened here was maybe some external agencies designed it and then maybe another agency developed it. And I don't know who's really taking care of it because the support seems to be also completely separate to everything. I don't know who did the QA on this thing because none of these things would get through QA quality assurance at a company that thrives on building good products. So when I thought of this, I thought of a lot of products, there are a lot of companies that just don't or at least at the start didn't do a good job with products but they just kept things extremely basic until the point where they would be good enough to actually create something. And I think Amazon is a good example. Really the Prime Video for a very long time, that product was terrible. And I'll just straight out say that it's, today it's also not a great product. It's the browsing in there is not great either. And I think that they know it and I also think then they take a very simplistic approach to it, they don't try to do crazy new things with that product. They just looked at what others were doing and made a simple version of that. And I think that worked well. Back in the day before SkyTicket, I would have said, ah, would it be nice if Amazon had tried to do something unique or even Apple, right? With the Apple TV would be great if they tried something crazy. But now when I see what happens when a company tries to do some slightly unique things, I'm just like, okay, what I actually want is for the f***ing videos to just play and I would be completely fine doing this in the Netflix interface or in any other interface. I just want the content. I don't wanna have to deal with your nasty, terrible, terrible tech and interface. And it just made me sad. One of the notes I took on my phone was there are a lot of companies, there are a lot of products where I feel like it's better to just literally copy or take something off the shelf if you're not competing on design in the first place, right? Sky is not competing on design and tech here. If the company doesn't have the competency then I just don't believe they should release something or even go for it unless they're gonna go all in and really build a proper tech team, a proper design team. Again, I don't know what happened to make this product so unbelievably terrible. But what I do know is that I can't imagine this being turned around anytime soon, this SkyTicket product. Almost every single part of it is terribly broken on all platforms. And I can imagine it's also stressful. I've worked with companies like this and having multiple instances of the same, streaming product on multiple different platforms is not easy to maintain, right? And there's also a structure and you have to choose, will I update on Samsung TVs first? Will I update on the PS4 first or will we focus on the Xbox One or is it the web version? And you really do need a kick-ass product team and a product culture to be able to pull this off. And when I look at a company like Sky, I'm just like, it would be so beautiful if they could just, I don't know, maybe make a deal with HBO and just use the HBO interface or just, I don't know, if some company, there are probably companies out there making just white-label streaming services that work really, really well that Sky could plug their content into. And I think there's nothing to be ashamed of using white-label or off-the-shelf templates, especially if you're not competing on design. Sky doesn't need to compete on design because they own the rights to all of these amazing shows in Europe. Yeah, that's kind of my point. My point is that I think there's like a lot of this talk around, design is the only way to win or like, you hear that often is like the design is the most important part of the product and it has to be unique, it has to be innovative, it has to be different, it has to be differentiated. And I don't believe that. There are products out there that just barely even bother with design. Look at something like Audible, audible.com, which is not sponsoring this podcast, unfortunately. Audible.com is like a website from the early 2000s, right? It doesn't, there's nothing special there and it works just fine, right? It's, there's really nothing there of the modern design kind of world and it really works just fine and they're not touching it. And I think that first version of Audible, it really did look like an off-the-shelf template. And I think really, you know, if you're not competing on that side of things, if you're not competing on the product experience itself and rather the content is what you're working with. You know, Apple got some shit for a while with Apple Music, Spotify got some shit for their product for a while when it was a, the interface wasn't great but it didn't 100% matter because they had all the content and then Apple Music came out and it was just so basic, right? It was the most basic product ever. But I think if they tried to do something really special from the very start, it's still extremely basic today. But I'm looking at Apple Music right now, it's extremely basic, but it does the job, you get your content, it barely does anything else. It's definitely not as fancy as Spotify but Apple in this case is not competing on design. They're competing on integration into other Apple services. That's the only thing they're competing on. It's like, you're an Apple customer? Great, you'll probably like Apple Music and we don't need to try to do all the cool that Spotify is doing, right? If you just even take a look at like the search page of Spotify versus the search page of Apple Music, you can see Apple's not even slightly paying attention to trying to be like this cool, fully featured app. It's more about them having this platform and them having this ability to have that content across multiple devices. And I think with a product like Sky, my hope is that they don't try to build fanciness on top of this because my worry using a product like this now is that, oh, okay, so the absolute basics don't work. Like video doesn't play, search is not working well. Resuming your videos, it's difficult to find. Like nothing saves. All of these things are horribly broken and there's loads of like really crappy security measures like not being able to look at things on a second screen. Oh God, they have this other thing. When you're trying to watch it, you can tell I'm very angry about this. When you're trying to watch something on your laptop, when I was trying to watch it on my laptop and push it to my TV, it just kept saying error and like this big long code to click on. And of course I didn't want to click on this big long code. I was already angry. Eventually I wanted to watch Chernobyl so much I clicked on the code and it was just like, if you have any piece of software open on your computer that could record video, it won't play video. So I was like, okay. So because QuickTime Player had opened up for some music earlier, I can't watch this video. The amount of people that are gonna be quitting this service because of things like this, it's crazy to me. While at the same time, I'm a big proponent of just getting things out there and having a first version that might be a bit crappy and then iterating, I feel like that doesn't apply when it's about the absolute basics, right? Not being able to play video on a video content product? That's not what I mean. That's not what I mean when I say getting started is more important than being right. That's definitely not it. I would prefer to use like an Excel file of the names of the videos that I have to command F to find the name of the videos and press play. I prefer that than the current situation that SkyTicket has. Yeah, I think I know a lot of people from the US are not using that or don't even know about Sky. But just imagine, just think about other products where you know that the company can't handle something like that. I mean, big telcos are also a great example. I don't know AT&T or Sprint or whatever, by Sprint, things like that. I don't know what products they bring out but I'm sure you are aware when companies like that bring out products, they're not like a product native company. They don't have that in their DNA. So often these products are not met with a lot of happiness and fanfare. So yeah, I just think these companies, right? Like if your company has something special like content or like, you know, if you're one of these telcos, what you have is like massive amounts of money and infrastructure. It's really great that you want to build your own products but I think trying to do something unique. Now I've been inside a lot of these corporates and the discussion is often like how do we make it more innovative? And I'm often thinking, well, you know, you've already got like something that beats these startups. You've got this type of content or you've got like this type of infrastructure. You don't need to beat this company that you're looking at on UX. You don't, you absolutely don't. You can bring out the crap version or the simple basic ass version and still win or still compete just because you have all of these other competitive advantages. So for me, I think what I'm irritated about is companies trying to design things, trying to look clever, trying to kind of out innovate other, you know, smaller tech firms who are large tech firms who were brought up on product development and you know, they, even the basics like having like a really great development team running an agile, like that's not something a lot of corporates have and that's fine. It's really fine. I don't have a solution to this. I'm just ranting. I'd love to hear if you're listening to this and you have some thoughts on that. It's pbcatajsmart.com or atjicecream on Instagram. Let me know what you think about the rant or the idea that like, you can just have a basic ass product. It doesn't have to be amazing if you have great content and design isn't necessarily always a competitive advantage. Don't fool yourself. Just because your product looks nicer does some cool animations. Doesn't mean it's going to be successful. On the other hand, like the basics, the absolute usability and UX basics, just try that first if you're a company that doesn't generally make products. So after this podcast episode came out, a lot of people including people from Sky contacted me which was really, really cool to hear and I got to hear a little bit more of the inside story. And I also just had a ton of people who were using Sky Ticket or products like HBO Go, contact me and just go, oh my God, these things suck so much. So I hope you enjoyed that little clip and obviously no hate to the people working at Sky. There are a lot of bad products in the world. This was just a really bad experience I had. I'd love to know in the comments what's the worst product you've used in the last 10 years. And remember, if you're interested in listening to that podcast, it comes out every Monday morning. We'll be posting a couple of clips here but every Monday morning you can listen to the full version and get sort of a deep dive into the tech and product world and it's also just a little bit silly. So thanks so much for watching. Give it a like if you enjoyed it. Leave a comment if you want us to answer something. Thanks so much, have a great day.