Hickey reports, “According to Afterdawn.com, which quotes unnamed executives familiar with the situation, the Nintendo Wii and Apple’s iPhone platform are next on the list.”
Hickey writes, “What’s interesting is the lack of mention of the Apple TV. Sure, the iPhone and iPod Touch are much more popular devices, but the Apple TV–which already features streaming media via YouTube and the iTunes Movie Store–seems like a much more natural choice. People want to watch the movies on their TVs… If Netflix can convince Jobs and company that ‘Watch Instantly’ will be OK on the iPhone, then it can argue the same for the Apple TV.”
Full article here.
Wow, that would be cool
That would be fantastic. I’ve been waiting for that.
Matt Hickey? Is that Peter’s brother?
Again Someone who can’t read.
NetFlix plans on giving away a Free App and then charging a subscription fee.
@ TT–
HAHAHAHAHA!!! Good one. Your wit is one of the reasons I look forward to reading the comments.
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@ Demon–
Well, duh. No one said that Netflix would ever be free. It’s a service that they provide at no additional charge for their existing subscribers.
Rejected!
Steve Jobs decides what you can and can’t run on your iPhone and iPod touch and he says no Netflix for you.
If you want movies and TV shows then you’re supposed to use iTunes.
Like many other items on iTunes Store, video isn’t a money maker. Rather, it’s an incentive to buy Apple hardware – iPod, Mac, Apple TV, whatever. If Jobs/Apple deems it “competitive” with Apple’s own offerings, it may be out. (Don’t know if the FTC will care or not.) If it’s deemed complementary, that’s another matter.
The ATV doesn’t have the technical specs to support Netflix. That’s why it wasn’t implemented in Boxee’s port to the ATV. Be nice if instead of wondering out loud about these things‚ the authors would actually do their research.
Netflix will have to come up with another DRM scheme to make this happen. Currently they us Mee2soft Silverlight, only runs on Intel Mac (well and of course Windbloze). You can be sure M$ won’t port Silverlight to all these other devices.
Netflix market cap is 1.6 billion. Apple can buy them with petty cash, and this is one of the very few acquisitions that makes sense. Why?
Because the iTunes rental library is embarrassingly paltry and the single biggest thing holding AppleTV back. Apple would gain the Netflix contracts and relationships for digital distribution while eliminating a primary competitor in that segment. They can just spin off the mail-order business or let it die on the vine- it doesn’t matter.
As always with the iTMS, though, it’s not about selling media; it’s about supporting and enhancing hardware.
When consumers can rent or buy and then watch movies on AppleTV with the same ease that they can get music to their iPods, the AppleTV will become do to the home entertainment what the iPod did to portable music.
And Macadvocate-
I know that Netflix’s tech isn’t compatible, but that’s not important: the standing customer base and contracts/relationships w/studios are.
MS will port Silverlight to anything where they could make money from licensing it. If the platform is large enough, the Silverlight division won’t care if it directly competes against some other Microsoft division (say, Windows Mobile, or Windows itself). I wouldn’t be surprised if MS provided API to Netflix, or even did some work on their own to enable Silverlight functionality on the iPhone, one way or another.
I already have streaming Netflix on my Tivo HD. It IS a cool and useful feature, but again it’s all about the library — there are a lot of titles, but often not exactly the ones I want to watch. Occasionally when there is one, it’s great to have it in my Netflix queue and be able to just watch instantly on my big screen. It’s all headed there — it’s just about the licensing of course.
netflixs “instant watch” feature doesn’t have any selection. it is a (very) few current tv series and movies and thousands of obscure b and c titles from the 70ies and 80ies. i never understood what would be exciting of having this.
It’s not the Apple Hardware. If it was then why can apple give me 720p and movies and tv shows. They only call for a 1GHZ processor to run the stremaing and the Apple TV has that. The Roku box Streams with about the same Hardware. See below. No it isn’t the hardware it is The DRM. To get around it people use microsofts silverlight that does require more processor. Remove the need for silverlight and it would run fine.
Look at Hulu as a good example. It ran fine at the Star of 2009. The cable and Satalite companies got involved and told Hulu they had to break it on apple TV and they did. Don’t belive me google it.
From a tech at Roku
There is very little memory on the board. Just enough to buffer a few minutes of video if your bandwidth gets congested temporarily. Just enough flash memory for the software. Instant viewing is done by buffering the minimum video the box thinks it needs to avoid interruption due to variable bit rate encoding.
Edit: The buffer is 64MB. 2-5 minutes of video, depending on the stream.
2) If you have Windows and IE, go to Netflix.com choose ‘instant watch’. The video you stream to your PC is the identical stream we’re pulling to the box. So you can preview the quality without even having the box.
Most videos, depending on the title, look quite good on my 60″ Sony HD.
Actual DVD will be better, of course, if for no other reason than surround sound. Audio tracks on instant watch titles are stereo only. Surround sound will come with HD streams.
3) It will up convert to HD when HD is made available. At this time, it only output 480p 4:3, and 480p 16:9. You will only be able to get HD resolutions on HDMI with HDCP support. Component video outputs are limited to 480p for copyrighted content because there is no copy protection.
4) Bandwidth is a very complex subject I won’t tackle now. But yes, if your cable modem is fast enough, it’ll work. It has a few minutes of video buffer, so as long as it can catch up from time to time it’ll work.
It really all depends on how you’re using it.
5) It’s a new chip made by NXP semiconductor. PNX8935
http://www.nxp.com/applications/set_top_box/ip_stb/stb225/
6) Not user expandable.
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QA Engineer for Roku