Netflix Begins Testing a Mac Streaming Solution

Way back in January, Netflix promised to add Mac video streaming to its "Watch Instantly" feature before the end of 2008. Well, they've done it, ironically, with the help of Microsoft technology. Microsoft's Silverlight to the rescue.

But hold onto your horses. Netflix calls this their second generation player, so it will likely cover PCs as well, and it also states that it will only roll out to a limited number of users at first. Yes, once again we consumers are beta-testing for someone.

Previously, Netflix outlined their issues with Mac streaming:

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.

And that's where Microsoft's Silverlight comes in. The Netflix player will use Microsoft’s Play Ready DRM, a feature that wasn't available before the release of Silverlight 2.0. Their press release says (emphasis mine):

Netflix, Inc., the world's largest online movie rental service, today announced it has begun the deployment of Microsoft Silverlight to enhance the instant watching component of the Netflix service and to allow subscribers for the first time to watch movies and TV episodes instantly on their Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers. The deployment, which will initially touch a small percentage of new Netflix subscribers, is the first step in an anticipated roll-out of the new platform to all Netflix subscribers by the end of the year.

The new Netflix player takes advantage of PlayReady DRM, which is built into Silverlight, for the playback of protected content on both Windows-based PCs and on Macs. That had not been possible with previous generation technologies.

Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt added:

"Silverlight with PlayReady offers a powerful and secure toolkit for delivery of dynamic streaming, which offers faster start-up, and higher quality video, adapted in real time to users' connection speeds. Members who enjoy watching movies and TV episodes from the growing library of choices that can be instantly streamed at Netflix will be thrilled with this next generation improvement of access and quality, on a broader range of platforms, including Intel Macs and Firefox."

Netflix was one of the early adopters of Silverlight, as was indicated by Microsoft when it launched the first version. This is great, but Netflix still needs to work on the other side of things --- content. Lack of content is what killed HD-DVD and although Netflix says it has more than 12,000 titles to choose from for "Watch Instantly," that's still just a fraction of its total catalog.