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.