3500 Netflix on Linux petitions.
Currently you can not watch Netflix if you are a Linux user and all those new Ubuntu Netbook owners will not be watching Netflix anytime soon either. Watching movies online through Netflix is an awesome service, but worthless to Linux users. Netflix has chosen to only allow Windows and MAC users access to their online streaming movie service and they are losing tons of money because of it.
Currently there are over 3500 signatures on the petition to get Netflix to support Linux users. Currently Netflix charges $9.9 (at the time of this post) per month for 1 DVD in the mail and unlimited movies online. That is over $35,000 per month Netflix could be racking in right now.
Is Silverlight the issue? Possibly. If Netflix has already spent $millions of dollars on a Silverlight streaming solution it’s doubtful they will spend more money on a Flash based streaming system.
This is how I look at it. If youtube can convert almost all of their videos to support the iPhone, it can’t be that hard to get Linux users up and going on Netflix.
SIGN THE NETFLIX LINUX PETITION HERE
DIGG ME
We don’t have netflix in Australia (might be coming soon I think)…so I’m not sure if it uses a special app or not, but I notice mythtv has a plugin for netflix and linux also has the moonlight project which is compatible with silverlight from what I can tell – so would that be enough?
Comment by Andrew — February 20, 2010 @ 3:48 pm
The petition is a lovely idea, but who is presenting that material to Netflix? It’s not much of a campaign if Netflix is supposed to discover this groundswell by themselves.
It might be more effective for those 3500 people to call Netflix customer service (they can’t be emailed apparently) and specifically ask for Linux support. That’s what I did. While I’m not holding my breath for a change, if 3500 more people did it it would make a huge impression.
Comment by bottleman — March 2, 2010 @ 2:37 am