Netflix Continues To Disappoint Linux Users

What's the risk? There's nothing on Netflix that isn't already on The Pirate Bay.<p>Wouldn't surprise me if it was a contractual obligation from Microsoft. In the past they were extremely aggressive in offering incentives and juicy licence terms for companies that would help push Silverlight.

The UK equivalent of Netflix called "Lovefilm" also moved from working fine under Linux (via Flash) to requiring Silverlight and of course moonlight doesn't work.<p>Their reasoning was that Silverlight had better DRM so people couldn't rip the films. However they also offered a DVD rental service , so you could get any of the streamable films (plus a load more) delivered through the post at which point it would be trivial to rip them.<p>I haven't looked but I'm pretty sure all of the films they offered for streaming are available as torrents too and probably at much higher quality.

Amazon Instant Video works under Linux...

Here's another theory - maybe it just doesn't make sense financially.<p>A source-only netflix wouldn't fly. So, they would need to get developers, packagers, QA, and support for either one or multiple distributions and many different hardware configurations, not to mention dealing with linux's plethora of audio subsystems and graphics driver issues.<p>It's possible to test on every ChromeOS device. It's much more expensive to QA and support every linux desktop configuration. Perhaps it's just not worth it because there are so few desktop linux users. The expected income would need to be much more than paying for linux devs/packagers/QA/support before it is a good business move.

I wonder how much they are saying "this is a small and thus irrelevant user base", and how much they are saying "this is a dangerous user base". Linux support manages to get them the sort of user who is least concerned with intellectual property laws and most likely to have the technical skill to work around their DRM mechanisms.

How many linux users don't have a box (ps3, wii, etc, etc) that DOES have Netflix on it and is conveniently already connected to a TV? Netflix's lack of Linux support, and choice of Silverlight, has always confused me but personally it's everywhere else I actually want it anyways.

Strange, Netflix works fine on Android Linux. What's desktop Linux doing wrong?

"I do feel this goes to show why Netflix is taking a continued hit on their stock price and subscriber base, simply put they lack innovation and are not catering to major niches such as Linux Users."<p>Funny, I thought the stock price taking a dive was because of the Qwikster fiasco. And I thought the falling subscriber base was because of the separation of streaming and DVD plans paired with a lack of good content that is available to be streamed.

Since Netflix supports android, it seems it should be possible to run the android application on a linux desktop.<p><a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/104957/is-it-possible-to-install-androids-apk-file" rel="nofollow">http://askubuntu.com/questions/104957/is-it-possible-to-inst...</a><p>However, it may be the case that the display ends up being quite small.

How difficult would it be to build out an Android instance with <i>only</i> Netflix installed? Then you could deploy the instance locally whenever needed... Or from a business point of view - get an ARM array of servers that can run it. Then have them launch on demand with user info, and allow people to "remote in" ?

I really don't understand why they are choosing to do this, it just seems like they are choosing to arbitrarily limit a set of their users. I'd even be willing to accept that I had to use Chrome and it was an app in the Chrome store (since they have a Chromebook version)

The irony here is that if Netflix supported linux, it would likely be via Ubuntu only, and then a bunch of linux users with their own favorite blend of Linux would freak out and it would turn into a potential PR nightmare because Netflix "isn't open enough" and RMS or others would talk about how evil Netfix is for not supporting DRM free truly open technologies and so on and so forth.<p>Also, the people who want Netflix for Linux already can get it on iOS, Android Xbox 360, PS3, Roku, Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, Apple TV, and on and on and on, so how many more Netflix subscribers are going to join that haven't already? Is that going to be enough money to offset the extra support costs as well as the likely PR nightmare described above?

They will see the error of their ways

The whole concept of "supporting Linux" is odd. Linux is a kernel. As a Mac user I don't go around asking if people support XNU.<p>A company like Netflix has to target relatively consistent environments -- operating systems -- so a much more honest question would be to ask if Netflix will support Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Mint, etc. In that case, the question is its own answer ("no, none of those are big enough"). Diversity can be a weakness just as it can be a strength.