Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Netflix Delivers Movies to Your PC
Netflix is delivering movies straight to your PC, following competitors like Apple and Amazon, which started offering movie downloads several months ago. The service is only available to select Netflix customers for now, but will be rolled out more widely over the next six months. So far, it is limited to 1,000 of the more than 70,000 titles in Netflix's library.
If you're like most subscribers who pay $18 a month for three movie checkouts, you'll get to watch 18 free hours of movie content on your PC. The catch is you'll need a 3 megabit/second connection get a DVD-quality picture.
While it's a good marketing move by Netflix to show shareholders that it's keeping up with the competition, it's actually a strategic mistake. The real competitors to Netflix are the cable companies as Om Malik points out. People prefer watching movies on their TV, not their PC especially if the picture freezes since their net connection can't keep up. The success of video sharing sites like YouTube is in offering tiny chunks of content not much longer than 10 minutes.
Netflix needs to follow Apple's footsteps with its newly-announced Apple TV, which brings online video to the big screen (your TV). Instead of streaming videos, Netflix should let users download them and give them a way to watch movies on their TV like they're accustomed to.
Update: I just had a brainstorm. Why look at Netflix's streaming movie service as online pay-per-view? It's clearly not since you get 18 hours of viewing time. It's based on duration not number of movies so it's actually a great way for users to preview movies before ordering them for mail delivery. It definitely reduces "renter's regret" and gives it an edge up on Blockbuster.
More dicussion at Techmeme.
Hacking Netflix has a screencast of the new service:
If you're like most subscribers who pay $18 a month for three movie checkouts, you'll get to watch 18 free hours of movie content on your PC. The catch is you'll need a 3 megabit/second connection get a DVD-quality picture.
While it's a good marketing move by Netflix to show shareholders that it's keeping up with the competition, it's actually a strategic mistake. The real competitors to Netflix are the cable companies as Om Malik points out. People prefer watching movies on their TV, not their PC especially if the picture freezes since their net connection can't keep up. The success of video sharing sites like YouTube is in offering tiny chunks of content not much longer than 10 minutes.
Netflix needs to follow Apple's footsteps with its newly-announced Apple TV, which brings online video to the big screen (your TV). Instead of streaming videos, Netflix should let users download them and give them a way to watch movies on their TV like they're accustomed to.
Update: I just had a brainstorm. Why look at Netflix's streaming movie service as online pay-per-view? It's clearly not since you get 18 hours of viewing time. It's based on duration not number of movies so it's actually a great way for users to preview movies before ordering them for mail delivery. It definitely reduces "renter's regret" and gives it an edge up on Blockbuster.
More dicussion at Techmeme.
Hacking Netflix has a screencast of the new service:
