Hacking NetFlix

Netflix New Releases for February 1st, 2011

Click here for the full list of new releases this week.

Interesting titles include Machete, Catfish, The Tillman Story, Night Catches Us, The Client List, Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2, Skin, The Pregnancy Pact, Welcome to the Rileys, Let Me In, Virus X, Monsters, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, and Big Love: Season 4.

Netflix Website Down; Streaming Issues Reported

Update: The Netflix website is back up.

The Netflix website is down and users are reporting streaming issues on Twitter. I am able to stream on the Roku Player, iPhone and PS3, but unable to access Netflix.com. 

Is Netflix working for you?

Amazon Getting Close to Offering Netflix Streaming Competitor?

It looks like an Engadget reader was accidentally offered Amazon streaming (image via Engadget), and it's the first proof of the December WSJ story about Amazon bundling a Netflix-like streaming offering with the $79 per year Amazon Prime service.

The movie detail page includes the following information about the streaming service:

"Your Amazon Prime membership now includes unlimited, commercial-free, instant streaming of 5,000 movies and TV shows at no additional cost."

Amazon is one of the few companies that could create a Netflix-like streaming service and compete with Netflix on streaming devices (although Netflix has a huge head start), content (Amazon has deep pockets), and they have a huge number of DVD and IMDB visitors to market the service to. It's also cheaper than Netflix's $7.99 per month plan, so they could grow quickly. What's funny is that both services would be hosted by Amazon's servers.

Are you an Amazon Prime subscriber? Would you switch from Netflix streaming to Amazon?

Thanks to Jon, John, and Dave for sending this in.

Naughty College Humor Tour of Netflix Streaming

If you're easily offended or at work, I'd avoid the following somewhat naughty and NSFW College Humor tour of Netflix streaming:

via Gizmodo.

Cord Cutting Years Away for "Normal" People?

Ad agency Hill Holiday gave a five families an Apple TV, Roku Player, Google TV, Boxee Box, and Xbox 360, and the comments of the participants are very interesting:

It looks like we have a long way to go before "normal" people will be cutting the cord. 

via CrunchGear.

Netflix Provides More Insight Into How Netflix.com Works

Netflix's Yuri Izrailevsky, director of cloud and systems infrastructure, posted more information on Netflix Tech Blog about the software they use to run Netflix.com.

As Netflix moved into the cloud, we needed to find the appropriate mechanisms to persist and query data within our highly distributed infrastructure. Our goal is to build fast, fault tolerant systems at Internet scale. We realized that in order to achieve this goal, we needed to move beyond the constraints of the traditional relational model. In the distributed world governed by Eric Brewer’s CAP theorem, high availability (a.k.a. better customer experience) usually trumps strong consistency. There is little room for vertical scalability or single points of failure. And while it is not easy to re-architect your systems to not run join queries, or not rely on read-after-write consistency (hey, just cache the value in your app!), we have found ourselves braving the new frontier of NoSQL distributed databases.

Netflix Shares ISP Performance Data - How Would Your Rate Your ISP?

Netflix has 20 million subscriber spread across every major ISP in the US and Canada, and as a result has a lot of information about ISP performance over time. Netflix has posted a detailed comparison of ISP performance on the Netflix Developer Blog (click here for a high-resolution image).

Netflix's director of content delivery, Ken Florance, explains the chart:

In the metric below, we’re filtering for titles that have HD streams available, and for devices capable of playing HD streams (which also filters out mobile networks), to highlight what’s achievable in terms of HD performance on the various ISP networks. As you can see, Charter is in the lead for US streams with an impressive 2667 kilobits per second average over the period. Rogers leads in Canada with a whopping 3020 kbps average. 

We'll update these charts monthly, and we welcome questions, comments and suggestions to help improve our understanding of Netflix performance on top ISP networks.

If you're a Canadian subscriber, Netflix has provided a similar chart for Netflix Canada that compares 

As Engadget HD notes, Verizon FIOS and DSL numbers are combined, otherwise FIOS would have probably scored high separately.

How would your rate your ISP for streaming performance?

Thanks to John for sending this in.

WSJ: Hulu To Transform into Online Cable Company?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Hulu's owners are considering changing the online TV and movie service into an online cable operator.

The free online television service has become one of the most-watched online video properties in the U.S. and a top earner of web-video ad dollars since its 2008 launch. 

But its owners—industry powerhouses NBC Universal, News Corp. and Walt Disney Co.—are increasingly at odds over Hulu's business model. Worried that free Web versions of their biggest TV shows are eating into their traditional business, the owners disagree among themselves, and with Hulu management, on how much of their content should be free.

I'm a Hulu Plus subscriber, and while I'm disappointed that most of the free Hulu offerings are not available on TVs through Hulu Plus, I love the huge selection of TV shows and the way Hulu notifies you of new episodes. If Hulu is going to compete with the cable companies, they'll also have to really expand the number of movies they offer.

I'm interested in seeing if Hulu's owners can create an online cable company that can compete with the big cable companies (the first à la carte service?). The WSJ article gives some insight into the discussions going on behind the scenes that are reshaping the way we watch TV online, and it'll be interesting to see what they do with Hulu in the next year or so.

Do you use Hulu or Hulu Plus? What do you like or dislike about the service?

Thanks to FearNo1 for sending this in.

Netflix Now an $11 Billion Company; Stock Trading at $217 Per Share

When I started HackingNetflix Netflix in 2003 I never would have thought the scrappy little DVD-by-mail company would be worth $11 billion dollars in 2011. Netflix (NFLX) is now trading at more than $217 per share as a result of Netflix adding more than 3 million new subscribers Q4.

Disclaimer: I still do not own shares in Netflix, and now I'm kicking myself for not buying some.

Who Has Streaming TV Series? Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and iTunes Compared

Tristan Louis on TNL.net took a look at the top 50 shows of 2010 and compared availability at Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and iTunes. 

One of the first inter­est­ing trends to notice is that Hulu Plus seems to offer more recent episodes when it does but Net­flix seems to offer older ones that are not avail­able on Hulu. Often­times, the two offer dif­fer­ent selec­tion on the same show, allow­ing users with sub­scrip­tions to both ser­vices to get wider cov­er­age.

Yet, Hulu only offers a bit over one third of all the big rat­ing get­ters last year and Net­flix offers only one out of five of those series on a par­tial basis.Cur­rent sea­sons seem to be a strength area for Hulu Plus and a sub­stan­tial weak­ness for Net­flix. This may be of some sig­nif­i­cance as far as the cord-cutter trend is con­cerned. A ques­tion one could pose here is whether cord-cutters want fresh con­tent or not. If the lat­ter is the case, then Net­flix may pro­vide enough. On the other hand, if cord-cutter expect to be able to get rel­a­tively recent shows on their TV, they will either have to check the Hulu Plus list­ing or pur­chase the episodes on an indi­vid­ual basis.

Here's a summary chart, but you should look for your favorite shows in his comprehensive chart.

What shows (and season) are you looking for Netflix to stream?