Filed under: Video, Internet Tools
Netflix talks 'Instant Viewing' for Mac
There are a few companies who, through their products and services, have earned a special place in my heart. Apple is one (obviously), as well as Amazon, New Balance, Nintendo, and Netflix. Netflix, in case you haven't heard of them, makes money via a subscription model. You pay a monthly fee and that gives you access to their monstrous DVD catalog. Pick a DVD and they'll mail it out to you in a nifty envelope that also serves as a the return envelope.Alright, so now we all know what Netflix is, why the heck am I blogging about it on TUAW? You might recall that Netflix has recently started streaming movies for members via their website. This feature is called 'Watch Now,' and appears on any movie that has been digitized for streaming. Sadly, this very cool feature is only available for PC users. The dev responsible for this feature posted about why Mac users are left out of all the fun.
It basically comes down to the fact that there is no movie studio approved way to wrap these streams in DRM, so the movie studios won't let it happen on the Mac. FairPlay is mentioned, but as we know Apple isn't licensing that. Luckily, the solution might be coming from an unlikely source: Microsoft. Silverlight, Mircosoft's answer to Flash, uses Microsoft's DRM which the studios do approve of. Silverlight is still in beta (for both Macs and PCs) but it does look very promising (and on my Intel Mac it was pretty peppy).
Thanks, Mike.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
rp said 4:13PM on 8-16-2007
Netflix should offer the option to people who don't want to (or in our case, can't - especially PPC users like myself) watch movies on their computer to opt out and pay like 2 dollars less or something like that. Basically, we're getting charged for a service we can't use. Class action lawsuit, please.
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Paul said 4:20PM on 8-16-2007
It's about time they addressed this issue.
Rp, you're not getting charged anything. Your subscription price actually has gone down since they've introduced it. To pretend you can tell them how to spend their profits in terms of development is ridiculous.
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WickDC said 4:41PM on 8-16-2007
Your comments: Just an FYI, "Watch Now" works great in Parallels. Of course a lot to do for just one feature, but even on a Mini with only 512 megs of ram, once XP and IE get going, movies play just fine, even full screen.
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DrWho said 4:51PM on 8-16-2007
Movie rentals in iTunes to watch on my AppleTV please!
@rp - you've got to be kidding us, right?
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Mo said 5:26PM on 8-16-2007
So, do you think ANY of the companies who say “Apple don't license their DRM” have actually _spoken_ to Apple about it?
Apple will license it, but the terms don't work the same way as Microsoft's DRM: you want to do FairPlay, you do the iTunes Store.
Perhaps it'd be more accurate to say “Apple do license their DRM, but we've not bothered our asses to get on the phone to them” or “Apple do license their DRM, but we don't want to do any kind of co-branding agreements and integrate with the iTunes store [which would reach both Mac and PC users, incidentally], even though it's what Mac users would expect”.
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Shannin said 5:46PM on 8-16-2007
the selection is crap,
also you only get an hour per $1 you spend, so when they release a good collection its going to be bad for people who want to watch alot of movies in one day.
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required said 5:50PM on 8-16-2007
I agree with rp. It's wrong to charge Mac users the same rate as PC users when PC users are getting a better product.
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required said 5:53PM on 8-16-2007
Shannin, "For each $1 of monthly plan cost (excluding taxes), 1 hour of instant watching is included. For example, if you are on our 3 at-a-time (unlimited) plan, you pay $16.99 a month, and you have 17 hours of instant viewing time per month." - netflix.com
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Andrew said 6:05PM on 8-16-2007
I'm confused, how is this news? This seems to be a reference to Netflix saying, again, that at this time they have no specific plans for supporting Macs with this feature. It's almost exactly what they've been saying since the streaming movie feature was announced.
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required said 6:50PM on 8-16-2007
Andrew, I think it has something to do with the netflix banner ad.
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Ben the Dog said 11:10PM on 8-16-2007
And again, I silently pray for the destruction of the person(s) responsible for DRM...
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Jean-Denis Muys said 6:07AM on 8-20-2007
Well, I am surprised nobody mentionned it yet: there is a publicly available DRM technology for video on the Mac.
It is currently used by the INA (Institut National de l'Audiovisuel), the French TV archive administration, to offer all their video on-line. And it works on Macs. See the English version at http://www.ina.fr/index.en.html
This technology is the one proposed by DivX. It works.It's just a shame this isn't mentionned more. Now, I'd also rather have all DRM eradicated.
Jean-Denis
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