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."

Comments

Frog, pot, increased heat

[speedlaw]

Really. No one wants DRM. The process of taking your computer from you is slow and incremental.

Re:Frog, pot, increased heat

[nine-times]

The thing is, this is one use of DRM that I think I might be able to live with: when you're renting content. Most of the things that I believe make DRM inherently unacceptable come from someone else trying to exercise control over something that I purchased and "own".

Re:Frog, pot, increased heat

[nEoN nOoDlE]

The thing is, this is one use of DRM that I think I might be able to live with: when you're renting content.

the problem with DRM is that it turns everything into rented content. Your music, your movies, your video games, and soon to be your applications and your OS. Everybody wants to switch over to a pay per use plan because that's how they figure they'd make the most money.

Re:Frog, pot, increased heat

[TheLongshot]

Which doesn't work with my monitor, since I have an older flat panel that isn't HDCP compliant. It makes the service completely useless to me.

Re:Frog, pot, increased heat

[berend botje]

The difference might be that DVD's do not stop working when the publisher shuts off a license server.

Re:Frog, pot, increased heat

[penix1]

The idea of DRM is fine, there are probably cases where it is makes perfect sense.

No it isn't. The whole reason for copyright isn't to make money forever no matter how the publishing corporations want to spin it. It is to enhance the public domain which doesn't happen with DRM. If you want to DRM content, then it shouldn't be covered by copyright since you violated the very reason for copyright.

Re:Frog, pot, increased heat

[hey!]

This is an important point. It leads an irony worth considering, based on the well known principle that local optimizations don't lead to global optimization.

Suppose Alice has content that Bob wants. Very few people would feel that Alice ought to be compelled to provide Bob that content just be cause he wants it. So Bob has to offer Alice some incentive. Alice names a fancy price, which Bob declines to pay. So instead Bob and Alice come to a somewhat more complex arrangement. Bob agrees to pay Alice a smaller price, but restrict his uses to those he is most willing to pay for. From a libertarian viewpoint, this seems innocuous. Alice and Bob are happy, so that should be the end of that.

But Alice and Bob are happy only with respect to the direct effects of this transaction on their interests. They are not necessarily happy about the net effect of information being encumbered this way throughout society. For example, many software licenses forbid publishing benchmarks or reviews without approval. Is the world a better place when people only have a vendor's word for what a piece of software is capable of doing? Are buyers better off?

The rental thing sounds innocuous, but it has important consequences as well. Alice can probably maximize her revenue for her existing content by adopting a rental model. But culture depends on free re-use of ideas, both subtle reuses that don't fall within the scope of copyright law, and obvious reuses.

Disney, for example comes down hard on people who would reuse images from its version Pinnochio, even though that work is by now sixty-four years old. However, their 1940 movie makes free use of the original story by Carlo Collodi that, because it was published in 1883, was only fifty seven years old at the time. Disney would argue, correctly, that at the time their usage was legal whereas their movie is still protected by current copyright. But they can't make a utilitarian argument that in this case protection is for the greater common good. Nor can they reasonably say it represents morally necessary protection of a fundamental right of creators to perpetual intelletual property protection.

The important thing is that when information is controlled solely by private agreements, the net effect of all these local optimizations across society is not globally optimal for the parties living in that society. We can take a lesson from the popular music industry, which is creatively moribund and therefore financially vulnerable. They can blame "piracy" if they like, but if they were producing what consumers considered a good value they would be much better off. Yes, it is possible to download files of unknown quality and provenance for free, but when consumers have access to a good selection through convenient distribution at a fair price, they prefer it. The iTunes store proves this.

But even something like the iTunes store is not a long term solution. As Pablo Picasso said, "Bad artists copy. Great artists steal." Art and culture depend on artists making old works their own.

The progress of useful arts and sciences can't be left entirely to contractual or licensing arrangements between private individuals, as practically useful and even indispensable as those might be. Given the power of technology to restrict information, the law that makes those arrangements possible must also promote the continuing enrichment of the general intellectual welfare, if we are not to suffer dire long term consequences. Unfortunately, we live in a country where politicians aren't very interested in culture, or any aspect of the life of the mind. I was shocked to hear one politician last week mock the idea that studying the spread of venereal disease was a worthwhile use of money. I believe that this anti-intellectualism comes from being so rich for so long that we've come to believe that we can live by managing the prior accumulated wealth of generations of intellectual achievement.

Re:Uninstall Reinstall?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, no one RTFA, but not even the summary?!

Once you opt for the new player, the old Windows Media based player won't function, not on any computer associated with the account.

It looks like a flag is set for the account when you "upgrade."

so just quit

[groslyunderpaid]

no, really. cancel your membership. now. everyone. then they will change. consumer whining does nothing. comsumers taking their money elsewhere does everything.

Re:so just quit

[fyrie]

Netflix has responded to complaints in the past. At one point they were going to ditch multiple profiles/queues per account, but they decided to keep them after the uproar.

Re:so just quit

[collywally]

I tried that with my car purchase but the government just subsidized them anyway.

Re:so just quit

[djupedal]

>"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.

Re:so just quit

[E IS mC(Square)]

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.

Re:so just quit

[ConceptJunkie]

I have a hard time believing there are those who were duped into downloading software that ended up hosing their system.

Well, you're a lucky person never to have dealt with Microsoft then.

Re:so just quit

[cmacb]

They respond to complaints when they are accompanied by lawsuits.

I canceled mine over the secret throttling issue, so I can't join the protest this time around.

I've since gotten my apology letter from Netflix promising me a whole goddamn month of one extra DVD if I ever sign up again. The lawyers probably got the rest (and I bet they still do throttling).

Go screw yourselves Netflix. I'll just wait for full online view-on-demand or do without.

Hey people learn to do without. Your going to have to do a lot of that in the future anyway, might as well make a protest out of it while it can do some good.

Re:so just quit

[hansamurai]

I just signed up two months ago and my wife and I each have their own queue. Sign in and go to this page and add a profile.

https://www.netflix.com/ViewProfiles

Viewer Quality

[Roxton]

I was one of the early adopters. Within a week of the release of NetFlix streaming on the XBox, my PC feed became useless. It would keep stopping to buffer, and eventually stop indefinitely. When I called NetFlix to complain, they suggested I try the Silverlight player. The quality was roughly on par with YouTube, but the buffering problems went away, so I went with it.

I'm wondering if the problem is not so much poor software quality as it is a bottleneck in the feed itself. Perhaps the servers can't take the load, or perhaps they simply don't have enough well-placed bandwidth. Their instant viewing subscriber base has been climbing tremendously.

they did tell you ahead of time

[Vorpix]

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.

kdawson

[Drive42]

=FUD. I have never seen an article penned by him (or her) that does not over-exaggerate the facts of the matter. The silverlight player has been out for a few months now. To have 480-odd complaints in that time, considering the size of Netflix's user base, while not great, is not that significant.

The implementation of silverlight is still an important problem because of the DRM and the possible incompatibilities and bugs, but it is nowhere a "disaster".

kdawson does nothing positive for slashdot. He should be removed. His entries sound like the worst kind of hellraising politics.

OS X Support

[georgevulov]

Personally, I am very happy with the new Silverlight-based movie player. The Windows Media Player-based solution offered no OS X support and I was forced to use VirtualBox to watch NF movies.

Also, in my experience the new player loads much faster and fast forwarding and rewinding works much better. I have not noticed a decrease in quality, probably because my Internet connection wasn't fast enough in the first place to get the highest-quality streams.

Re:OS X Support

[Draconix]

Seconding this. I've been using the Silverlight-based player, and it's been ace on OS X. The quality isn't stellar, but it's not bad enough to bother me either. It's a lot better than say, Youtube, but not as good as Quicktime streaming. It's maybe a little worse than DVD for me, which is perfectly fine by my standards.

Only problems I've had with it were occasional movies with audio out of sync, but it's a rare problem. (I've had it happen two or three times out of at least 50)

The DRM doesn't really bother me in this case. I'm renting these movies, not buying them. The DRM isn't depriving me of anything. (I'm really anti-DRM for things one owns, but seriously, for rental services, DRM makes perfect sense to me.)

It's the encoder, stupid.

[Silverlancer]

There are pretty much three choices for streaming video right now:

1. Crappy encoder, low bitrate. This is what Youtube went with originally--they used FLV1 (Sorenson H.263) video, which at the time was the only real option (other than VP6, which wasn't much better). They went with 350kbps video. The result was pretty awful, but it worked for Youtube videos. It's free, so people will tolerate it. But for a paid service, such quality is absurd.

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! 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.

3. Good encoder, low bitrate. Facebook does ~600kbps standard definition video, and it looks great. Vudu does 1080p video on demand at 2.8mbps. Youtube now does 720p HD at 2 megabits. What do they have in common? They use x264 for encoding.

NetFlix chose to use VC-1 instead, and as a result they have 1.5 megabit standard definition streams that look like crap. And they don't even have an excuse anymore, because Silverlight supports H.264. Which is rather odd, actually, as Microsoft has been pushing for years to try to replace H.264 in the marketplace with their vastly inferior VC-1. Maybe they've given up because their campaign just isn't working.

Re:It's the encoder, stupid.

[evilviper]

NetFlix chose to use VC-1 instead, and as a result they have 1.5 megabit standard definition streams that look like crap.

The codec-standard being used doesn't have a huge amount to do with video quality. The implementation matters a lot more than the codec.

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).

You can certainly find commercial H.264 video encoders that produce horrible results.

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.

What x264 has going for it, are the same things Xvid and Lavc (ffmpeg/mplayer) have going for them... Lots of people spending lots of time, dedicated to improving the encoder, for everyone's benefit. Whether you love or hate open source, perceptual coding is really the canonical example where proprietary software just can't compete. Actually LAME, Musepack, et al, fall into this category as well, on the audio side of the spectrum.

Of course, the most prominent counter-example would be Theora, which has turned into a bottomless pit of embarrassment, but several-dozen to one isn't bad odds at all.

But I digress.

Netflix does a lousy job at video encoding. They could do a much better job, while sticking with VC-1, but they instead chose not to invest the slightest effort into it. Switching to x264 would help a lot, but switching to Xvid, or Lavc MPEG-2 would do almost as much, really.

In conclusion, where'd my bottle of whiskey go?...

They reversed course on the single queue downgrade

[sottitron]

Back in June of 2008 Netflix was going to shutdown the feature for managing separate queues. They sent an email and I canceled my account that day. Not sure how many of us there were, but they reversed course quickly. If you're pissed about the silverlight player. Close your account and email them a note to say why you did it. Maybe this will be a non-issue in the morning... Here is a link to the original plan on Ars Technica: Netflix killing extra queues

Re:I see comments in the thread linked to...

[jackchance]

I am a mac user, so i only saw the silverlight version. But the video quality is way better than youtube. It is not DVD quality, but it is close. I haven't used it in a few weeks. It is totally possible that the increased popularity of the service has choked their bandwidth.

I just logged in to check, and the quality is fine. About as good as standard TV.

I think it is sort of funny that netflix gave this service to existing customers for free. and now people are bitching about the quality of this service that i see as basically icing on my dvd subscription cake.

Re:Uninstall Reinstall?

[Firethorn]

except that new accounts get no choice.

I recently signed up and never new about anything other than the silverlight player.

Say What?

[secretplans]

.torrent + utorrent + VLC = WTF is NetFlix?

Re:so just quit - or don't start

[Anonymous Coward]

If I could watch the instant content in Linux, I would already be a customer.

For now though, my torrents provide me the latest content, DRM-free, and they usually arrive faster than the mailed DVDs.

Re:Secret reason for this change!

[ectotherm]

See, I KNEW we should never have stopped using VHS... ;-)

Re:Secret reason for this change!

[mail2345]

If Alice and Eve are the same person.

Re:Secret reason for this change!

[HeadlessNotAHorseman]

The real reason for this change is that there are tools that rip the old Windows Media stream and let you save the instant movies on your computer. So far I haven't seen a similar tool for the Silverlight streams.

Check again in about 10 minutes...

Re:Uninstall Reinstall?

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

You clearly are new here. As a subscriber to a technology that has both DRM and Microsoft attached to it, you are mandated to be (at a minimum) morally outraged.

Never bored with same show over and over?

[TheLink]

Amazing? It's called Alzheimer's disease you insensitive clod!

Re:Secret reason for this change!

[zerocool6900]

Actually I've been using Netflix for over a year and they haven't tried to throttle me. I get 3 to 4 movies each week.