Remember last week, when that guy at CES asked the guy from Netflix why their Watch Instantly streaming service doesn’t work on a Mac, and the Netflix guy was all, “It’s totally Apple’s fault,” and I bought it, and a million Apple fanboys wrote in to tell me that I was wrong? Those were heady times. But now it looks like there’s a new kink in the works, which puts Netflix and Apple’s reticence to get together in a new light.
Last night, Netflix announced that anyone who has access to the Watch Instantly program (so, anyone who pays more than $4.99 for their Netflix account, who accesses the service via any machine not running either Mac OS or Linux) will now have unlimited access to the 6,000 available titles. The AP story leads off by positioning this move as a strike at Apple, who are expected to announce at MacWorld this week that they’re adding a movie rental option to iTunes.
So, apparently, it’s not that Netflix wants to work with Apple, and Apple is holding out––Netflix clearly considers Apple a competitor. At this point, I guess we can expect to be able to access Watch Instantly on our Macs … um, never?
4 Comments
Why is it apples fault that they won’t let netflix use apples DRM when Netflix uses Microsoft’s DRM and Microsoft won’t let it run on OSX. Shouldn’t Netflix ask Microsoft to make it work on OSX. Or maybe Netflix needs to find a DRM solution that runs on multiple platforms including linux.
What is interesting is that you only need iTunes to handle Apple’s DRM - so it works on PCs, Macs and iPods. Then they also have DRM free songs (from EMI, iirc) and those will work on anything….
So Microsoft has its WMA standard, which can play on Macs (with the proper free add-ons), however their DRM only plays on Windows system and I guess only on WMA DRM compatible players…
so Netflix wont support Macs? Maybe they should rethink their strategy?
Lame. Every time iTunes/Apple gets into a pissing match everything just gets dumber.
YEAHHH FREE MICHAEL VICK