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.
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?
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.
It’s too bad, but I think the real problem is the same one that prevented Netflix from working on Mac for so long: The MPAA has only approved certain DRM tech for Netflix to use. For a long time that wasn’t available on Mac, so they jumped on Silverlight when it came out on Mac.
So the petition may need to go to the MPAA, not to Netflix.
Well I officially canceled my Netflix account. There really is no point if I can’t watch on my Linux box. And DONT tell me to VBox Windows!
I won’t even use Silverlight on my windows systems. Who wants yet another proprietary standard? MS has shown a complete lack of ability when it comes to security and produce buggy code., Flash may be far from perfect, but at least it’s cross platform and mature enough that the major holes are patched. Frankly if it’s not an open multi platform standard I’ll wait for HTML5.
Silverlight is DOA as far as I’m concerned.
Nah, Moonlight 2.99 worked fine for me for the Olympics, and would work for Netflix. The problem is the DRM.
But Netflix put all the DRM and other modules for the Wii on a CD-ROM and distributed it. It works great. They could do the same thing with Linux.
After all, they licensed something to Roku, which is a Linux box.
This isn’t a technology issue — it’s a business issue.
But clearly they could use the Wii CD solution …