Netflix Community Blog: Instant Watching on Mac, Firefox, and More

Netflix’s Steve Nat on Mac support for their “instant watching” feature:

A key issue for delivering movies online is that the studios require use of DRM (Digital Rights Management) to protect titles. And that’s our holdup for the Mac — there’s not yet a studio-sanctioned, publicly-available Mac DRM solution (Apple doesn’t license theirs). I can promise you that, when an approved solution becomes available for the Mac, we’ll be there. I’ll also say that Silverlight 1.1 looks like a promising candidate — but that its DRM isn’t likely to be fully available until 2008.

Not really Netflix’s fault — they can’t force the studios to let them deliver video without DRM, and they can’t force Apple to let them use FairPlay — but this still stinks, nonetheless. (Thanks to Nat Irons.)

★ Thursday, 9 August 2007