Netflix Instant Streaming Coming to Android Courtesy of Qualcomm

Posted 02/14/2011 at 3:45pm | by Ryan Whitwam

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At Mobile World Congress today, Qualcomm has announced that they have struck a deal to bring Netflix streaming to the Android platform. The news came as the chip maker was discussing their upcoming quad-core Snapdragon chip, some clocked as high as 2.5GHz. The details of the arrangement are a little lacking, but we did get some idea.

The new Snapdragons have been certified by Netflix, and will be capable of highly efficient hardware decoding in the chip. This chip should also reduce buffering times and allow for smoother playback. We know that in the past that Netflix expressed concern over a lack of good DRM solutions on Android. We have to wonder if Qualcomm did not come to some special arrangement with Netflix on that matter as well.

So Netflix is coming to Android, but the number of phones will likely be limited at first, and even then only handsets with the new Snapdragons will have a shot. Although, we give the dedicated Android hacking community a few hours to rectify that once the code is in the wild. Until then, we can dream.