Netflix Streaming App Coming to iPad

http://mashable.com/2010/04/01/netflix-ipad/

by MykalMorton • 16 years ago

54 24 16 years ago

Amazon Kindle App and now Netflix Streaming App. iPad is just becoming sweeter and sweeter!!

dpritchett• 16 years ago

The Netflix app appears to be free unlike the Hulu app. Netflix already charges $5-10/mo. for access to their library so they can get away with offering this service at no additional cost.

Hulu is behind what with their users having grown accustomed to free content. Selling "mobile Hulu, only $X/month" is going to be a tough sell.

marknutter• 16 years ago

This is the iPad killer app or an April Fool's joke.

zephjc• 16 years ago

I basically don't pay attention to stories on April Fools day - to the few I do, I just wait and see if there is any follow up the next day.

kwamenum86• 16 years ago

This is a game changer for me. I told myself before that there is no way I would waste money on one of these. Now...maybe. I'm starting to get a feel for what is possible.

johnrob• 16 years ago

... and why didn't they already launch an iPhone app?

cbryan• 16 years ago

I'm wondering what technology Netflix is going to use to stream video to their app and how they're going to address studio's security concerns. IIRC, they were using Silverlight because it supported some encryption scheme that made everyone happy.

Hm, looks like Silverlight can run on the iPhone: http://mashable.com/2009/11/27/silverlight-iphone/

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

Whoa, what? From the article:

What’s even more interesting is that this wasn’t a skunkworks proof-of-concept project, Microsoft got the OK from Apple. This is in stark-contrast to Apple’s stance on Adobe Flash, which currently has plans for all mobile platforms except for the iPhone.

So according to Mashable, Apple is indeed allowing a runtime environment, running interpreted code on the iPhone, in direct contravention of the SDK guidelines (unlike Flash CS5, which is compiling native IPA binaries with nothing interpreted at runtime). Very weird.

wfarr• 16 years ago

"Then, using HTML 5’s <video> tag, Silverlight is able to communicate a QuickTime request to the IIS server, which then decodes the MPEG-2 v8 file dynamically and starts streaming it to the iPhone.

This is extremely similar to how YouTube content currently works with the iPhone. Because Silverlight already supports GPU acceleration (a feature that is coming to future versions of Flash Player 10), battery life and overall performance has the potential to be quite strong."

Also from the article.

danudey• 16 years ago

There was an article about this a while back (whose link I can't find).

Microsoft's Silverlight-to-iPhone streaming is basically 'Microsoft implemented in IIS Streaming Server a streaming standard the iPhone already supports'. It doesn't require any approval from Apple. It's just streaming h.264 over HTTP.

PanMan• 16 years ago

Nope. Only silverlight video streaming works on the iphone. They implemented Apple's http video protocol on the server side. Doesn't need Apple's permission for that. You can't run actual silverlight apps on the iPhone.

wmf• 16 years ago

This is something called Silverlight that is totally different from Silverlight.

Netflix could have built their own DRM system that runs on the iPad, but I'm guessing they just used RDF to distract and confuse the studios.

gr366• 16 years ago

Bear in mind that Netflix streaming doesn't typically include the latest popular releases (hey, that's what iTunes Movie Store is for, right?) However, they do have a pretty decent selection of titles. At the moment, just over 25% of my nearly 50 queued movies are available for streaming.

tseabrooks• 16 years ago

If I get the 3G will AT&T let me stream my netflix movies over 3g?

maukdaddy• 16 years ago

Probably not. I doubt you'd get sufficient speeds even if they allowed it.

jsm386• 16 years ago

I wonder how this is going to work...My 1st gen MacBook (with 2GB RAM) cannot handle my Netflix stream (1.21 MB/s maxed out on Time Warner). It chokes every few seconds.

ktf2• 16 years ago

Yeah... ever since the switch to Silverlight, Netflix streaming has been unwatchable even on my fairly up-to-date desktop machine.

jsdalton• 16 years ago

This is already possible via any netbook or tablet -- via the browser, at netflix.com. I've been watching streaming Netflix videos this way on my laptop for a long while.

Are we honestly going to get hyped up about every last feature of existing services that an iPad application replicates?

glhaynes• 16 years ago

What you're seeing is that people are starting to realize that this device can do the vast majority of things that people want to do on their computers. And with nearly none of the time/cognitive/frustration burden of a "computer" -- notice how "normals" don't think of the iPad as a "computer": they think of it as... well, an iPad. Normals don't want computers but they want what computers can do.

crux• 16 years ago

Yes. The entire appeal of the iPad isn't, 'This can do a great many of the things that my computer can already do!' it's, 'This makes it so much more pleasant to do [X] than it is on a computer!'

So every new feature that we see demonstrated isn't just filling in a little bit more of the difference between an iPad and a netbook; it's bringing the experience of the iPad to the tasks and behavior we're looking for.

This is the way that innovation happens, even though a lot of people don't realize it. They're stuck in the old mode of innovation, the King's Quest VI mode. The first time I saw a CGI video playing off a CD-ROM I was blown away by the capabilities of computers. By now I know what computers can do, and I have seen enough CGI video to be pretty well-convinced that anything I want can be rendered by it. Likewise, we have enough technologies at our disposal right now that we could spend a long, long time improving the software that we use simply by designing better interfaces for it. If you wait around for an entirely new technology—something that isn't possible on your laptop, like Star Wars-style holograms—you're gonna miss several boats.

To put it more directly: there's surely some people who have already ordered the iPad who will be thinking, 'Oh, nice. There's another thing I can use it for.' But the story here is the many, many more people who are thinking, 'I love Netflix/Hulu/[whatever pre-existing service will be replicated next week], and if I could use it on a magic ultra-light wireless multi-touch slate, I'd buy one in a fucking second.'

tvon2• 16 years ago

FWIW, it's real, it's in the iTunes App Store. (iTunes link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/netflix/id363590051?mt=8 )

bmalicoat• 16 years ago

I love how it has 57 five star reviews without anyone actually having it yet.

tvon2• 16 years ago

iTunes reviews are so completely useless.

ktf2• 16 years ago

And yet there's still no Linux support? At this point, I can watch streaming movies on every device I own except my computer.

Netflix Streaming App Coming to iPad

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