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Uproar Over Netflix's New Instant Viewer
almechist writes "Many Netflix customers are up in arms over the new instant-watch player powered by Microsoft's Silverlight. The official Netflix blog is full of complaints from users who decry not only the new player's quality but also the way it's being distributed, with many claiming they were deceived into downloading it. Once you opt for the new player, the old Windows Media based player won't function, not on any computer associated with the account. The new player is supposedly still beta, but NF members are strongly encouraged (some say tricked) by NF into the so-called 'upgrade,' which is permanent — there is no way to opt out. The marked decrease in video quality seen by those who have switched is perhaps not surprising, since the old player could utilize bit streams up to twice as fast as the new one, but this information is nowhere given out by NF. So far NF has been answering all complaints with variations on 'tough luck pal, you're stuck with it,' but many customers are so disgusted they're ready to cancel their NF membership. This could be a public relations disaster in the making for Netflix."
I see comments in the thread linked to by the original post. But I don't see any information saying there's really widespread unhappiness. There are 483 comments in the thread, most negative but I have no idea how large or how representative a sample that is. I can't tell how much of this is the standard negative reaction to any major upgrade. Does anyone have any data on complaint levels for prior Netflix upgrades?
when i first saw the silverlight player i considered trying it out. but when i looked into it, netflix made it clear that this would make silverlight your only option. i didn't really want to go full-on with silverlight so I just passed up on it.
it's not like netflix hid the fact that you couldn't use the WMP version. it wasn't discreetly placed in the fine print.. it was pretty clear.
now, i don't really understand why they are forcing it to be an all-or-nothing decision.. but don't blame them for something they told you ahead of time about, and you had to opt into.
frog blast the vent core
Even though they were running both players... This situation certainly associates silverlight with poor quality.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
From a technical side, Silverlight offers them a lot more than the old player. Being able to support Mac and hopefully someday Linux via Moonlight is something that should increase their customer base with their streaming only plan looming.
>"This could be a public relations disaster in the making for Netflix."
>"...consumers taking their money elsewhere does everything."
I'm sure there are 'investments' in place by MS that will ease any pain in the short term.
Reed Hastings, Netflix founder and CEO, holds a seat on Microsoft's board. Microsoft purchased, (purely for investment reasons) 1% of Netflix stocks. Netflix will do what MS wants.
We are talking about Netflix. Yes, they are a company looking for making profit, but they are also one of the few companies who have a solid record of listening to their customers. I have nothing but positive experience with Netflix. Give them a chance - let's see how they will react to this.
I think it might be your Internet connection more than anything else. Every time I have ever pulled something from Netflix it ran at decent speed (5+ Mbit at least). Of course even if it would have run slow, I would not have had problems with buffering because I would always just download the whole thing before watching it (the Microsoft DRM doesn't care).
With that said, the DRM crap pisses me off because I can only watch movies in a VMware Windows machine because I don't have any actual Windows machines. So I haven't used it in ages.
Don't know if this has been mentioned yet but this post is from last October.
MLB.tv did something similar a year or so ago where they switched from something that is actually meant to play video (WMP) to something that I can't really tell what it's meant to do (Silverlight). They had a similar deal where once you opted in you couldn't change back to WMP. They had (have?) all the same kinds of problems with it not working for people or just being worse quality.
Now this has happened a second time with a completely separate content provider and I don't know what to think other than that Silverlight is synonymous with crummy picture quality and choppy playback.
Sick of people knocking on Gentoo's greatness in completely unrelated
That's odd since I currently have three queues on my account.
Possibly. Just as an alternate theory, I'm going to throw this out there as an alternative-- instead of this:
1) Management got a phone call from Microsoft, or an MSCE Certified Bonehead, who said "Switch to Silverlight, they will wuv you 4ever!"
It may have been something like this:
1) Management got a phone call from a movie studio exec saying, "Do you know that people can get around the copy protection on your download service? Fix it now, or I'm going to sue your ass, you'll lose all of our content, and god help you in trying to get rights to stream my movies ever again."
1.3) Management called Microsoft and said, "Do you know that your copy protection is useless? How do we stop people from capturing the movies that we're streaming?"
1.6) Microsoft tells management, "Just use Silverlight! It will solve everything, and we promise that we're not pushing a sub-par solution in order to displace Flash."
no, really. cancel your membership. now. everyone. then they will change. consumer whining does nothing. comsumers taking their money elsewhere does everything.
I for one won't be supporting your boycott. Netflix delivers my DVDs in a quite timely manner, and it's a great convenience (price-wise and otherwise) over Blockbuster and the like. Oh, and I don't stream my content. Why would I? DVDs allow me to view on my own schedule, and I can keep them as long as I want.
I have a hard time believing there are those who were duped into downloading software that ended up hosing their system. Sounds like some sour grapes to me by a few unhappy individuals.
Got just one on mine, and when I asked about it, I was told it was history.
Perhaps the decision to keep them was limited to grandfathered cases, new enrolls don't get the option.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
I tinkered with Silverlight some back when it first came out (before it was even .NET integrated), and I wonder if someone using a utility such as wget could simply retrieve the Silverlight XAML file, view the source and then retrieve the video file from the URL shown in the source. Unless the newer silverlight is compiled or something, it theoretically should work since, unlike trying this with PHP or ASP.NET code, it is up to the browser/plugin to interpret the XAML not unlike regular JavaScript.
And if the Silverlight app is embedded within another (binary) app for display or some other means of obfuscating the location of the XAML file, couldn't Ethereal/Wireshark simply reveal the location of it granted the traffic is not encrypted? Anything can theoretically be cracked.
We are talking about Netflix
The same company willing to advertise via popup ads, mind you. It's the principle of the thing, and yes the popups still get through even modern popup blockers usually in response to clicking the background page. It tends to just turn me off with the company given the lack of business ethics as opposed to blatant (and paid for) spamming.
I would open another Netflix account and sell my old-school-player account on Ebay. New accounts now are Silverlight-only and the ability to use the old player has market value.
... or they could just conform to open standards.
"open"... "standards"... Two words that should really only see each other every now and then, and always with court-ordered supervision. -_-
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
In every codec bakeoff I've seen, VC-1 comes out ahead of x264. Check out avsforum.com.
2. Crappy encoder, high bitrate. This is what Stage6 did; they used DivX, which, while better than FLV1, wasn't too much better. But what they did was allow absurdly high bitrates; I saw bitrates over 12 megabits per second for standard definition video!
DivX is pretty much the de facto standard for standard definition video. It's quality is only poor when compared to x264, which is generally reserved for HD.
Of course, we all know what happened to Stage6; upon realizing the sheer amount of money that such bitrates cost, they went out of business, sort of like Wile. E. Coyote falling to the ground only after realizing that he was standing on air.
Actually, DivX, Inc. owned Stage6, and they're still very much in business. But you're right, the official reason given was trouble financing the site.
NetFlix chose to use VC-1 instead, and as a result they have 1.5 megabit standard definition streams that look like crap.
Actually, VC-1 is quite comparable in quality to H.264/x264, varying bitrates aside.
for Microsoft?
Why is that? Because Microsoft is a part owner of /.?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
kdawson does nothing positive for slashdot. He should be removed. His entries sound like the worst kind of hellraising politics.
The sort of flamefest that it generates helps get more ads in front of the eyeballs.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
For very high quality encoding, you really can't even theoretically do much better than MPEG-2 already has. All newer codecs can really do, that old ones couldn't, is to do a better job of masking digital artifacts, when using bitrates so low that they can't be avoided (1.5MBps should be high enough not to require it).
This is simply not true for any practical application. If you pump up the bitrate high enough, MPEG-2 and h.264 will both produce just I-frames encoded pretty similarly. But at those bitrates people will be using something like MJPEG, or a lossless codec.
H.264 has a significantly better motion vector system at practical bitrates that will produce a far superior image than MPEG-2. When Blu-Ray was first came out, all of it's movies were in MPEG-2 for some reason, while HD-DVD was in H.264, and the HD-DVD movies had significantly higher quality. It wasn't until Blu-Ray producers switched to using H.264 that they were able to make movies with excellent quality. (This despite more than a decade of development on MPEG-2 codecs.)
WMV3 (aka WMV9, VC-1, etc.) suffers from the fact that practically nobody but Microsoft chooses to make an encoder for the format, and Microsoft isn't interested in the endless testing a tweaking that it takes to really squeeze the maximum quality out of it.
VC-1 actually has pretty good quality. (I have no idea if further development could improve it much though.) VC-1 is almost as good as H.264 for quality at a given bitrate. Where it shines though is that it takes significantly less CPU power to decode. It's not uncommon for a PC to be able to decode a VC-1 1080p stream, but not an H.264 one.
Still, Netflix is the only major system that I know of that uses VC-1 heavily. Blu-Ray CAN use it, but most producers seem to use H.264 instead. I suppose they figure that they might as well get the extra quality as they know hardware players will be able to play either back fine.
Not really.
I spend >$10 on a DVD that usually only watch once or twice.
I spend ?$13 on Netflix per month and watch 5 or 6 streaming movies. Or for $10 I could watch 3-4 Movies on XBox marketplace.
Do I spend more on pay per view? Yes. I usually rent more than I buy. But largely because I pirate less. It's supporting the content providers and they're offering me an affordable, reasonable service.
I don't see the problem. They're offering me a better experience than the previous model (buying DVDs) at a discounted price. How many movies do you own that actually were cheaper than $2 per viewing?
Pay Per View should cut piracy because the entry cost is lower. $2 for a possibly mediocre movie vs $18. If you aren't willing to spend $2 on a movie then you don't really deserve to watch it, it's almost impossible to not get your money's worth at $2.
Quite a few. Although this is mostly because I don't buy DVDs at release, so I don't intend to pretend this disproves your position. However when comparing renting and buying it is also worth considering that when you buy a DVD:
1/ You can lend it to someone else.
2/ You can sell it.
3/ If you rented a film and really liked it, if you then chose to buy it then you have paid both to rent and purchase it.
I bought Napoleon Dynamite because of the great reviews I'd read, I watched it and thought it was terrible. However as the DVD cost me £3 ($4.25) I can sell it and make back almost my entire expenditure.
Their instant viewing subscriber base has been climbing tremendously.
I would expect it to die down soon enough - the content they offer on Instant View seems to be the bottom 10% of the catalog. We have 450 DVDs in our queue, there were about 45 available for instant view, once those were gone, there's not really anything compelling left in the Instant View catalog.
I wouldn't say we're winning anything. A combination of (willful?) ignorance and the lack of a market means things are definitely going to get worse in the short and medium term, and the only possible escape route I can see right now is that somehow in the future Hollywood will suffer a massive financial crisis, be forced to make movies that cost a few million each, and find themselves in the same situation as the recording industry.
My favorite example of how we're losing is Blu-ray. Just over a year ago, the consensus amongst geeks were that HD DVD and Blu-ray were both "evil" compared to regular DVD, and both equally evil, and both needed to be boycotted. The exception, for the most part, were PS3 owners who didn't much care anyway.
The problem was that this was false. HD DVD had a number of advantages over DVD (lack of region encoding for a start, and theoretical support for Managed Copy though this still needed a DRM framework in which to operate, but it was at least a loosening of the chains), whereas Blu-ray had one show stopper that should have concerned everyone: In Blu-ray, DRM is mandatory.
That means that if you're part of the non-DRM supporting community, you can't play in the Blu-ray sandbox at all. It means public domain content, widely available on DVD in CSS-free discs for a dollar or two a pop, is going to be locked down and uncopyable - under penalty of law - in high definition form on Blu-ray.
Let me repeat this, because many people don't get it. If you want to distribute content on a widely supported format in high quality high definition, you have to do so with DRM, because the one format left requires it.
We're definitely going backwards here. It's one thing to say "Ok, let's have a community that respects copyright law but eschews DRM because it impedes both on fair use content usage, and damages the public domain", but if the industry says "No, sorry, that community is not going to be allowed to exist, we're actually going to actively prevent that community from even supporting one another", then yes it damages us.
The DRM-free options are being taken away. How is that not a loss?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.