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Why There's Still No Netflix App For Android
An anonymous reader writes "Why is there a Netflix app for iOS devices and Windows Phone 7, yet no Netflix support for Android? Well, Netflix has been working on an Android app but has run into a few technical hurdles because Android lacks a universal DRM solution which means that the company has to work with different handset manufacturers separately in order to ensure that the installed DRM protocol meets the requirements laid out by the movie studios."
Maybe the preponderance of Android devices where you really can't enforce DRM will drive companies like Netflix to start bargaining for the right to stream without DRM. Not that it'll probably happen, but it's a nice dream...
Forget Android...what about Ubuntu? Just once I would like to access my Netflix accnt. without having to start my VM for XP!
Netflix runs on the Google TV... http://blog.netflix.com/2010/10/netflix-on-google-tv.html
Google TV runs on Android... http://code.google.com/tv/web/faq.html
Thus Netflix runs on Android. I don't really know much about the whole pkg infrastructure, is the Android VM still close enough to Java for the write once run anywhere?
Obviously I can't know exactly what they are thinking, but here's my guess. To us the business case is obvious: if you provide a service which is convenient and cheap enough, most people will opt for convenience and pay for the product. I mean you *could* have a garden and grow your own food, and you could prepare that food yourself. It isn't *that* much work and the result is very rewarding. But most people would rather get in their car and drive to Mac Donald's. Why? Because it is convenient. People are willing to pay for that convenience as long as the cost is reasonable.
But the media execs, even if they realize this, want the freedom to charge whatever they want for things. What is a movie *worth*? Well, since you don't need it at all it doesn't have any intrinsic value. It's only value comes from creating a desire to want to see it and limiting the availability to see it. The value of the movie becomes what the customer is willing to pay, not what it's intrinsic worth is.
The media industry has also realized that high prices serve their interest even if they don't directly make high profits as a result. People will want to see movies more if there are huge amounts of special effects, high priced actors, etc, etc. If the average movie costs $1 million to make, you will have a lot of competition from other companies. But if it costs $100 million, there aren't many groups with the capital to break in and compete with you. So if you can raise prices and spend all your money on production, advertising, etc, etc you still end up ahead. This is especially true if you are performing all those services and skim a profit at each step (i.e., the movie makes no profit but every service performed makes a profit and since you own those services you make a profit).
So in other words, they need to keep supply low to keep prices high to maintain their monopoly position in the industry. I believe this is their real interest in DRM. The "convenience" price point is too low to accomplish this.