News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

May 2, 2007

video

Netflix Watch Now feature coming soon to a Mac near you

Posted May. 2, ’07, 5:12 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Video

Silverlight Back when Microsoft announced Silverlight (including Mac plugin), I speculated that one of the announced customers, Netflix, would probably leverage the technology to deliver its streaming movies feature to Mac users. That speculation was dead on.

Dave Zatz has a video (in Quicktime ‘natch) of the demonstration that was recently given. If you fast forward to a little past halfway (the thing is long) you’ll be able to see the portion in which a Netflix movie is being streamed to a Mac with Firefox. This could very well be the beginning of the end of online movie sites with support for Windows/IE only. That’s assuming of course that Microsoft doesn’t suddenly decide to drop support for the Mac. coughWindowsMediaPlayercough Oh, and for those of you PowerPC users enjoying Silverlight 1.0, you’re stuck there while Intel Mac owners can move on up to 1.1. Feel the trend.

They do show off a couple interesting features, like “shared viewing” (you can watch the same movie at the same time, synchronously) and instant messaging. I’m more interested in no longer using Parallels just to fully use my Netflix account. No word on how soon this is coming yet, but I’m tingling with excitement.


4 Comments

Joel said:

There is not a CHANCE I'm going to install this piece of microsoft crap. If they're not going to build a Mac editor... locking people yet again into the microsoft OS, then I'm happy to stick with Flash. (what can this do that flash can't anyway?)

May 2, 2007 5:54 AM
Steve said:

I used to use Parallels to watch my Netflix movies too. Then, the site required me to update something and the thing hasn't worked since. Needless to say, I'm ticked, but Netflix said they don't support WinXP through virtualiztion methods, just when it's run natively... i.e., they wouldn't help when I called. This can't come soon enough. As Joel said, I don't see why they don't just use Flash for this. Then I could watch it through my TV on my Wii.

May 2, 2007 7:46 AM
Jason Author Profile Page said:

The short answer is, they're using this because they're using Microsoft's DRM.

May 2, 2007 10:04 AM
michael said:

My netflix Watch Now feature was turned on just a week and half ago, and I started out using Parallels to watch it, works fine. But then I used in Boot Camp too and found out that the video quality was higher, probably because Parallels doesn't support DirectX or something..?

but anyway, just curious if anyone else has noticed a difference in video quality for the movies in parallels vs. Boot Camp

May 2, 2007 11:22 AM

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