Friday, August 27, 2010

Netflix Comes to the iPhone and iPod Touch

Netflix announced Thursday the release of a free Netflix application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allows streaming of movies over Wi-Fi or a 3G cellphone connection.

This has been expected since April when Engadget fisrt wrote about it.

Netflix is becomming ubiquitous with its streaming offering not only supporting Windows and Mac, but a number of BlueRay player, set top boxes, game consoles such as the Xbox, PS 3 and Wii.

It's based on Microsoft's Silverlight which is very heavily DRM oriented.

As such there is NO Linux support! Microsoft did share most of the Silverlight code as Moonlight but without DRM support so Netflix will not play on it.

Netflix is basically following Microsoft's Silverlight support on to these different platforms. I think this strategy is to allow Microsoft to easily add support to devices based on Linux such as many BlueRay players while not allowing open source Linux Desktops to compete. This also will allow them to support large a hardware base as Adobe's flash player which now dominates Internet video streaming.

When you consider that Apple is not allowing flash on it's iPhone and iPad, and that Steve Jobs is openly speaking out against Adobe Flash it could actually place Microsoft at and advantage over Adobe in the Internet streaming market.

* Personally I think watching TV on the iPod is the killer app.

I have disconnected my Cable TV a while ago and live off Netflix, Hulu and BitTorrent for most of my viewing pleasure.


Netflix iPhone App Video

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