Hacking NetFlix

@Netflix: Netflix Not Abandoning DVDs Anytime Soon

There was a lot of buzz lately about Netflix's Reed Hastings (CEO) and Barry McCarthy's (CFO) comments about a streaming-only plan, but whoever is running Netflix's Twitter account wants to reassure customers that DVDs are here for a while:

 

The reality is that only about 12% of Netflix's DVD inventory is available for streaming, so it'll be a while (probably years) before it gets anywhere near the 100,000+ DVD titles. The hybrid DVD and streaming approach gives customers the best of both worlds while Netflix gains customers and market share in anticipation of the industry transition to streaming. 

I still look forward to the day when every movie ever made is available immediately on any device. Sigh.

How Can Netflix Improve Streaming?

You seem pretty happy with the image quality, but I've received a number of e-mails about the way Netflix streaming works: 

Satya wants subtitles and better controls: "I hit the play button in my queue, downloaded Silverlight, and watched about 3 episodes of various shows. Issues: None of them had subtitles. Some searching on the internet revealed that Netflix is indifferent to this issue. There was little support for fast-forward (2x,4x play) or reverse. You can seek with the bar, but that's inadequate and error-prone. So... will Netflix ever address this, and how does it affect all those set-top boxes?"

Patrick wants more warning before streaming titles expire: "I  find it frustrating that Netflix can't provide any better lead time for letting us know that movies will be expiring from the queue. For instance, I have Bram Stoker's Dracula and Storytelling in my queue, and suddenly this morning it says one is expiring March 1st of this year and the other is leaving March 6th."

John wants a bigger buffer: "Because the [Silverlight] buffer is 1mb, that means it's downloading 1mb worth of content, dumping it as it's watched, and perpetually downloading the next segment.  So when I back it up to change scenes, I have to wait for it to download all over again.  With the previous player, as I was watching the first few minutes, it would download the next few minutes and continue downloading until the entire show was cached.  If I bounced around, it would pick it right up."

JP wants to know the aspect ratio before streaming: "It’s difficult to know whether to add a movie to the “watch instantly” queue or to the DVD queue because the watch instantly version can be any size (cropped) or quality, and the users do not know at the time of selection (for queuing up movies for watching on Roku or TiVo). If Netflix has cropped them to 4:3 as watch instantly streams, I’d add the movie to the DVD queue. In my cursory experience, roughly 50% of the movies have been cropped to 4:3 when streamed. Do you know or your readers know if Netflix is planning on adding this information to the watch instantly movie specification page or some other means of knowing in which queue to add a movie?"

How would you improve the Netflix streaming feature?

Netflix Subscribers Added 2 Million Movies To Queues During Oscars

Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos at the Goldman Sachs Technology & Internet Conference said that Netflix subscribers added close to 2 million movies to their queues during the 3-hour Academy Awards show. Slumdog Millionaire was the top selection, but customers also added more than 56,000 different titles.

Netflix Streaming-Only Plan for $10 Per Month?

Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy at the Jeffries 5th Annual Internet & Media Conference confirmed that Netflix is going to offer a streaming-only subscription plan (the folks at Netflix are fond of saying that they named the company Netflix for a reason). McCarthy noted that $5 per month for unlimited streaming was "a little extreme," and "$20 was "at the opposite end of the spectrum," so can we expect a streaming-only plan for $10 per month? 

What types of titles would they have to add for you to consider dropping the DVD part of your subscription?

Netflix Annual Report Now Available Online

Netflix has posted the 2008 Annual Report, available free in a variety of formats from http://ir.netflix.com. 

Here are some interesting tidbits from the report:

• Netflix now has more than 72 million DVDs.
  
• Netflix employs 1,644 full-time employees and 1,626 part-time workers.
  
• Why streaming titles disappear with little warning: "Many of the licenses provide for the studios or distributor to withdraw content from our service relatively quickly. Because of these provisions as well as other actions we may take, content available through our service can be withdrawn on short notice. For example, in December 2008, certain content associated with our license from the Starz Play service was withdrawn on short notice."
  
• Does the Microsoft Xbox agreement expire at the end of 2009? "For example, while the PC and Mac platforms constitute the largest number of devices used by our subscribers to enjoy streaming content, the agreement covering the next largest number of devices will expire in late 2009, unless the partner exercises its option to extend."
  
• Blu-ray discs are more fragile than regular DVDs: "Studios have begun to release films in high definition format on Blu-ray. This new high definition format DVD has higher damage rates than we currently experience with standard definition DVDs." 

Jim Cramer on Netflix

Love him or hate him, Jim Cramer talks about Netflix:

How Would You Rate Netflix's Streaming Quality?

Netflix is polling streaming customers and asking about the quality of a show they recently viewed:

Since Netflix doesn't share this information (and I don't get a lot of complaints about this), I'd like to see what you think about the quality of Netflix streaming:

Please expand on your rating in the comments. Be sure to include details about your setup, including connection speed, platform (Mac/Win), and TV/Computer size and resolution.

Queued: Open Source Netflix Application Showcases Adobe Air & Dojo

Queued is a new open source Netflix application that was written to showcase the Dojo Javascript library and Adobe's Air development platform (Adobe sponsored Queued). If you're interested in trying Queued, you can download a free copy from SitePen (requires Adobe Air).

I initially had some trouble running the application on OS X, but was able to find help online. Adobe Air is a cross-platform development platform that enables the creation of applications that run on Windows, Mac and Linux. Queued ran quickly on my Mac, and enabled me to view my DVD queue, streaming queue, the Netflix top 100, new releases, search for movies and view recommendations.

 

SitePen has posted a video that demonstrates the Queued application: 

Thanks to Troy and LifeHacker for this story.

Is Netflix Really Doomed?

Tim Beyers on The Fool wonders Is Netflix Doomed?  

So if we're only now seeing the death of CDs, isn't it fair to think that DVDs -- and DVD-by-mail -- have plenty of fight left, like an aging boxer who still packs a wicked right cross? Most of the video download services operating today first arrived in 2006.

Netflix, meanwhile, is charging a premium for Blu-ray rentals and quietly taking ever-bigger bites of the DVD rental market:

 

What do you think? Is Netflix doomed or will they survive the transition to online streaming?

Thanks to Mannydr2 for sending this in.

Netflix Customers To Stream More Movies Than DVD in 2009?

FeedFlix is a Netflix account analysis tool that enables you to see what you're spending on each DVD, the average time you keep a movie, and it even bugs you when you've kept a DVD too long. What really interests me is the aggregate data, such as Blu-ray adaptation, average rental length, popular plans, and queue sizes.

Feedflix is also tracking the number of Netflix DVD rentals vs. streaming, and is showing a trend for streaming to overtake DVD rentals in 2009:

The only problem with FeedFlix's data is that there are only a small number of subscribers that are using the service, so I believe that the information reflects early adopters that are more likely to be using Netflix's streaming service.