Apple & Netflix in January?

Mac Columnist Jason O'Grady wonders if Netflix & Apple might be working on a partnership.

While I can definitely see Hastings being introduced by Steve Jobs during his January 9 keynote address, there's another big factor at play here. Netflix is a potentially huge competitor to iTunes. Apple already sells downloadable movies via the iTunes Store so the potential conflict may be too much for Apple to resolve. Do they build, buy or partner for video downloads and streaming?

What do you think? Apple & Netflix? What ever happened to TiVo & Netflix? I think January will be an interesting month...

Comments

[Aron]

I think there is quite possibly a valid partnership here because selling the movies themselves is not Apple's primary business model (it's merely supportive), and selling the hardware is *probably* not Netflix's revenue stream (it's merely supportive).

But I don't think either would want to be exclusive.

[Edward R Murrow]

From the Mac article, "So what does Netflix bring to the table? For starters, they have a billing relationship with millions of customers who like to rent movies. Second they have distribution deals in place with all of the major movie studios."

Apple already has a billing relationship with millions of customers through iTunes for movies and music. Further, I don't believe that Netflix has a distribution deal with the studios for download or if they ever will.

It's still not clear to me what Apple gets out of a potential partnership unless Apple wants to simply forego the revenue stream and give it as free money to Netflix. If I were a stockholder in Apple, I would be extremely irate if Apple didn't build out a solution themselves in iTunes for iFlix or whatever they would call it. The technical work is not that difficult.

[Ricklogic]

Before all else, be sure that download is an entirely different space than rent by mail!!! And how could anybody think for a moment that Apple would need Netflix?

The guy who wrote the article is lucky to have a job if that was his best work.

From his article:
"During the 60 Minutes interview with Netflix founder Reed Hastings, Lesley Stahl point blank asked him about downloading and he was carefully vague. But Stahl later said that Netflix's download service would debut in January. January?! The timing is perfect to coincide with MWSF."

What is wrong with this guy? He doesn't get that Stahl just misunderstood that Netflix is announcing their plans in January, not launching in January? You know, like having a meeting to prepare for a meeting.

Also, from his article:
"Perhaps the most telling part of the 60 Minutes segment, was a brief interview with Bruce Eisen, president of CinemaNow:

"But right now, for most people who would go to your site to download a movie, they would have to watch it for the most part, on their computer?" Stahl asks. "Right," Eisen says. "You hit the nail on the head. Using it is easy. Connecting it to the TV where most people do want to watch it isn’t easy yet."

This guy doesn't read much about what is going on. From Video Business:

DVD BURNING SET FOR ROLLOUT
DVD Forum approves new recordable disc with CSS copy-protection
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 12/7/2006
DEC. 7 | Industry efforts to develop a uniformly compatible download-and-burn system have cleared the last major technical hurdle, opening the way for commercial implementations of customer burning services early in 2007.
At its Nov. 29 meeting, the DVD Forum gave formal approval to a new type of recordable disc that will accept movies encrypted with CSS, the same copy-protection system used on retail discs, for playback on set-top DVD players.

I won't even start on the comment in his articl about "distribution deals" since he completely betrayed his ignorance with that sentence.