Netflix to Add Mac Video Streaming in 2008

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

The video streaming services currently offered (or recently announced) all seem to be missing something, right? Yep, in general they are missing Mac support. On Netflix’s Q4 earnings call last night, they indicated they “hope” to support Macs this year.

According to Netflix, the hang-up has been DRM (natch). This echoes a Netflix blog post from last year in which “Steve N,” responsible for the viewing feature, said:

And that’s our holdup for the Mac - there’s not yet a studio-sanctioned, publicly-available Mac DRM solution (Apple doesn’t license theirs). I can promise you that, when an approved solution becomes available for the Mac, we’ll be there.

Additional tidbits from the call:

• Netflix believes Blu-ray has the advantage right now (you think?!)

• Speaking of HD, a “meaningful” (whatever that means) percentage are renting HD - but because of the “relative lack of content” the overall percentage is not that large.

• Speaking of streaming, when asked about why they added “unlimited streaming,” Netflix said it was simply to simplify the service, not because people were hitting caps. Additionally, they see no reason to worry about too many users streaming huge amounts of data (esp. in Beaumont, TX, right?) such that they have to again limit streaming.

You can find their press release with the financial results here.