“Online and mail-order video company Netflix has no plans to bring its streaming service to Research In Motion’s PlayBook tablet,” Alastair Sharp reports for Reuters.
“‘We don’t have any current plans to support BlackBerry devices, including PlayBook,’ the company said on Twitter late on Thursday in response to a query,” Sharp reports. “Netflix has long been available for Apple’s iPhone and iPad and devices running Google’s Android software.”
Sharp reports, “Netflix has more than 24 million U.S. subscribers, where it offers both a mail-in service and streaming movies and TV shows. It also has also expanded its streaming-only service to Canada and parts of Latin America.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Netflix also has no plans to support Amiga products, either.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]
Does RIMM have any plans to support the PlayBook?
What is a BlackBerry device? Is it a machine for extracting juice from fruit? Why is the word BlackBerry being used in a tech forum.
It’s supposed to be an Apple forum. Now we’re getting mixed fruit! 🙂
Hey now, I was just going to get the ol’ Commodore 64 out of storage.
I think RIM would do better to drop Playbook altogether. Then they could focus on iPad apps for BlackBerry Devices. Apps that would sync info both ways. Then they wouldn’t waste $$$ on something that won’t sell. 🙂
It’s because too many Blackberry owners are looters and can’t be trusted with copyrighted material. There could very well be more store burning because of this.
I’m eagerly anticipating this headline;
“Netflix: No plans to support beleaguered Microsoft’s Tablet, Windows Phone 8 devices”
wonderful comment – good one NHL
But they will be supporting the Commodore 64! Yippee!
That MDN take should be archived in a “Greatest Hits” collection.
——RM
Hey MDN, what’s with cheap shot at the Amiga!? Back in the day the Amiga was a great computer. I had it for 10 before giving away to tech geek who wanted to do to it who knows?
The Amiga was impressive! If my memory serves me, They had that soccer ball bouncing around in color for a demo
Enough with the epithet “beleagured” already!
I had a vic20 and a vic64 and a Pet — I don’t feel offend by MDN words. Its rather funny.
So many people seem to be so etiquette with online conversations – how words are written and yet forget the basic manner to be polite.
If you had those devices (vic, pet), you have been around a long time!
I share your interest in the dimensions of communication. Here at MDN I see it all. Human protocols horribly violated, or poignant acts of compassion. (70/30?) Good voices should not depart.
Useful content, though, can be sketchy at times. (Screaming in a vacuum, at times.)
The disinformation, dismissiveness, and disdain for the Playbook on Apple-centric sites is hilariously off-base. It’s like listening to American rednecks bitch about how terrible Japanese cars are. The referenced quote is incorrect and misattributed. The actual quote was from a Netflix Twitter post, which _actually_ said, “We don’t have any _current_ plans to support BlackBerry devices, including PlayBook.” In the week since making that statement, Netflix has received an enormous amount of encouragement from its customers to allow Netflix on Playbooks. They’ll release their own client eventually, not that that’s much of an indicator.
It’s quite true that the Playbook has essentially no share of the tablet market, and that they aren’t selling well. The Playbook is, however, an insanely great device with a fantastic operating system. It runs Android apps astonishingly well. Sure, it’s funny to give RIM shit; they’ve screwed up pretty famously, and they pretty much sank their own brand image. The Playbook may sink into obscurity, but if it does, it won’t be due to the device’s merits; hardware and software are both top notch. The device is phenomenal. I’ve used every major tablet on the market, and the Playbook is as good as anything available, and it beats the pants off of the iPad 2 in several respects. Multitasking is profoundly better than idevices, and its ability to flawlessly run Android apps has really surprised me. Not every Android app works straight out of the box, but the conversion process is nearly trivial. Every day, I see the library of repackaged Android apps that run on the Playbook grow significantly.
I -never- would have bought myself a Playbook. I flat-out didn’t believe my dad when he told me how amazing it was. To convince me, he bought me one. After a couple of days with it, I’ve realized that he’s right. I’ve been looking forward to the Asus MeMo 370T for a while, and the very idea of a Blackberry device made me cringe. I despise proprietary approaches. 15 years as a UNIX system administrator and network engineer taught me the necessity for open, transparent, standardized systems. With the Playbook, RIM has gone in that direction. The MeMo will have more CPU & GPU horsepower for $50 more than the Playbook, but as of now, it isn’t available yet.
Under the slick UI is a POSIX-compliant UNIX, based on the QNX Neutrino real-time operating system. It’s nice. Really nice. It has run _every single_ Android app that I’ve thrown at it–about 30 or so apps, so far. If you think that it’s silly and primitive compared to the iPad… you’ve obviously never touched one. Yup, it’s true, as of a week ago, Netflix had made no plans to port their app to the Playbook. Not that it’ll matter in whether the platform survives, but I have watched Netflix on my Playbook. I can plug my Playbook into a monitor or my TV and watch gorgeous 1080i video without buying another device. It’ll do that in the background, while I do other stuff on the tablet. Without a hitch. The software development kit is awesome, and its free. It’s trivially easy to get stuff to compile on the Playbook. HTML5 and Flash video work great. The Playbook has played every video encoding and container format I’ve thrown at it, without installing additional codecs or apps. The filesystem is logical and accessible, and it interoperates beautifully with other computing platforms. I can make my idevices do what it does, but only with significant modification, time, and energy.
If you don’t like it, that’s cool, but at least know what you’re talking about before trashing it. It’s the first really great, inexpensive tablet. At very least it’ll catalyze a major leap in what people expect from a $200 device. There are a lot of crappy platforms out there–ones that *should* fall by the wayside. The Playbook isn’t one of them. It isn’t like anything else RIM has done, and should never have had the word “Blackberry” on it. Ah, well.
Incidentally, the Commodore 64 and the Amiga were great, too, and both quite successful. If you guys think that Apple will be king forever… well, that’s not how things work.