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Leaked Screenshots Show Netflix Downloads
Mike1024 writes "US DVDs-by-post company Netflix appears to be planning a service that will let users download movies over the internet. Hackingnetflix.com has some accidentally-revealed screenshots, and the Netflix jobs page includes a product manager position, saying "The Electronic Delivery Service (EDS) will augment Netflix's current DVD delivery model with high quality movies delivered to consumers' home TVs through the Internet, on a subscription basis". Apple's iTunes demonstrated many people are willing to live with some DRM and hardware/vendor lock-in."
This really shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone, since it was announced last fall that Tivo and Netflix had worked out some sort of agreement for downloadable movies...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Funny, Netflix seems to doing just fine with the "be happy waiting a few days" business model. Why do you think a few hours is a worse one?
I use Netflix, and the thing is they send you more than one movie at a time (depending on your subscription). I can set up the list of movies I want to watch, and I almost always have one on hand when I want to watch something. The other great thing is no more wandering around a movie store looking for something to catch my eye. Currently I've got over 100 movies in my queue - I'll probably never see them all.
I imagine any kind of download service will be the same way - I can download multiple movies, so I always have something available. After I delete the last movie I watched the next one in my queue will be downloaded. Probably a lot like their current service, just faster.
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For a full dvd disk image, its 4 gigabytes. They'll most likely use compression, but even if they didn't its still doable.
The average download speed I'm seeing on residential cable is now 6megabit. google says:
(4 gigabytes) / (6 (megabit / second)) = 1.51703704 hours
Or, roughly a little longer than it takes to watch it. Buffer for 30 minutes or so and you could stream the rest.
With FIOS and other closer to true broadband internet connections becoming much more common, it makes even more sense(FIOS's common package is 15/2):
(4 gigabytes) / (15 (megabit / second)) = 36.4088889 minutes
Most good codecs can squeeze a movie down to 1.4 gigs or so, so downloading is entirely an option. Streaming VOD as yous uggest would work just as well, but theres no reason you couldnt keep a copy.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
I'm the guy who submitted that news to hackingnetflix. I actually just scraped that HTML by copying it from my account page and pasted it into my gmail that I sent to hackingnetflix. It wasn't a screenshot at all. The save button was probably below the stuff I grabbed.