As Netflix tells it, the company's streaming subscribers all around the globe are collectively watching a billion hours of movies and TV shows each month. Serving up that amount of content takes some serious bandwidth, and up to this point, Netflix has been relying on third party content delivery networks (CDNs) to pipe petabytes of data to ISPs like Comcast, Charter, and others, who in turn deliver the video to home PCs and living room HDTVs. Now Netflix has its own CDN to play with.
At this point in the game, Netflix Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings puts little effort into hiding his disdain for Comcast, the largest cable operator and Internet service provider in the U.S. He's complained about Comcast before and the favoritism the ISP gives its own Xfinity Streampix service over Netflix, and he decided to dole out a mini rant over the weekend using Facebook as his soapbox.
The Plex media server is purdy, flexible and capable of handling gobs and gobs of metadata, but one major hurdle has been holding it back: relatively skimpy device support. Yeah, you could run Plex on Google TV, some LG products and (starting recently) Roku, but that was about it. That's poised to change with a new beta release that adds support for the widely utilized DLNA protocol.
Do you remember what you were doing in 1987? It was the year the Simpsons appeared for the first time as a series of shorts on The Tracy Ulman Show, Bow Wow was born, and both Larry Bird and Magic Johson were still in the NBA. It also happens to be the year an incident led to the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which was enacted a year later, nearly a decade before Netflix was founded and 16 years before Facebook launched. Yet this quarter-of-a-century old legislation is the reason why Netflix hasn't released a Facebook app in the U.S.
We already have Apple TV and Google TV, and if all goes to plan, Intel TV could be next. The Santa Clara chip maker has its eye on the pay TV business and for the past several months has been wooing media companies with a plan to create a virtual cable operator to stream U.S. channels over the Internet as part of a bundle that rivals subscription services by cable and satellite TV providers, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Netflix is killing cable. How many times have you heard that? (Admittedly, you probably heard it a lot more before Netflix's price hike and the whole Quikster thing.) But after years of painting streaming services as the devil, a new report says that the cable companies may be considering a Faustian deal: signing a pact with Netflix and offering it as an optional service straight from your cable box.
Hulu Plus found a new way to be streamed into your living room. Nintendo today announced it has teamed up with the streaming video service so that Wii owners can now subscribe to and access Hulu Plus for $8/month and instantly stream popular TV shows like Family Guy, Glee, The Office, Modern Family, and more, as well as hundreds of movies, on their Wii console.
As it searches for a way to turn its fortunes around, struggling phone maker HTC is reportedly investigating the possibility of launching its own music streaming service. The client would be built into the default music app on all of HTC’s Android devices, and possibly as an add-on for Windows Phone. The company is, as expected, cagey about answering any questions at this point.
Every quarter it's the same old story for cable companies. Subscriber losses have become the norm as streaming continues to pluck more viewers away from tethered cable, and in the fourth quarter of 2011, Comcast lost 17,000 TV customers. That might have been cause for panic a decade ago, but in today's landscape, Comcast has reason to celebrate.
If emulation is the sincerest form of flattery, Spotify and Pandra should be blushing. By essentially copying what they do, MySpace might be in the process of reversing its fortunes as the once dominant social networking playground reportedly gets ready to announce a million new users over the past month. That's in stark contrast to losing 10 million users a month, which the site was bleeding as recently as March of last year.
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