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Why There's Still No Netflix App For Android

Posted by timothy on from the wouldn't-exactly-say-I-was-missing-it dept.

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."

5 of 291 comments (clear)

  1. I Can Dream, Can't I? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  2. Too Easy by redemtionboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seems like there could be some solution...staring me right in the face...I dunno....maybe no DRM....but nahhh. That's just crazy...

    1. Re:Too Easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Good point. Right now the torrent sites are filled with x264 rips of blurays, but if this netflix app came out on android with a flaw in the DRM, the torrent sites would clearly start offering these low resolution versions instead.

  3. PlayReady DRM by Mulder3 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Netflix uses MS PlayReady DRM... Microsoft provides an implementation of a PlayReady client in ANSI C... Android has a NDK to write native apps.... So, what's the problem here?

  4. Netflix does run on *some* Android devices by happymellon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?