Showing 40 posts tagged netflix
“Throughout the month of May, Netflix will lose streaming rights to a whopping 1,794 titles because of expiring deals with Warner Bros., MGM, Universal, and Viacom. A big chunk of them will expire tonight at midnight — and by the end of the month, Netflix Instant will have lost the whole lot.”
“On his Facebook page yesterday, Hastings said that Netflix served up over 4 billion hours of streaming video during the first three months of the year, reaching a high-water mark for the company.”
Netflix gets unfair postal advantage, U.S. court finds
A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that Netflix Inc received an unfair advantage from the U.S. Postal Service’s special handling of its DVDs, and ordered postal regulators to remedy the discrimination or offer a good explanation.
The unanimous decision, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is a victory for GameFly Inc, which said the postal service should treat the games it ships similarly to Netflix DVDs.
The court did not order a specific change in how the postal service handles digital disks, instead leaving it up to the Postal Regulatory Commission to determine an equitable solution.
» via Yahoo! News
High-res
Netflix ranks ISPs by streaming performance, Google Fiber wins
The streaming-video king released a report this morning ranking 21 major U.S. ISPs based on real-world streaming performance. Google Fiber came in the lead by quite at bit, with an average of 2.55 Mbps in November, with the next closest competitor (Verizon FiOS) coming in at 2.19 Mbps. Unsurprisingly, DSL services came in behind all the major cable/fiber services, with the best performer averaging just 1.42 Mbps in November. The best mobile service to crack the list is Verizon at a relatively pokey 0.76 Mbps.
» via CNET
Is streaming video costing Amazon up to $1 billion a year?
The Netflix CEO gave an interview to Dow Jones today in which he said Amazon is losing between $500 million and a $1 billion a year as a result of acquiring rights to streaming video content.
In the interview, Hastings said he came up with the numbers after comparing the value of the content deals Amazon won when the two companies directly competed for rights.
» via CNET
US judge rules Netflix subject to disability act
A federal judge in Springfield has ruled that Netflix and other online providers that serve the public are subject to federal disabilities laws, a decision that could require TV shows and movies streamed over the Internet to include captions for the deaf or other accommodations.
On Tuesday, US District Judge Michael Ponsor rejected Netflix’s argument that it is exempt from the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA. He declined to dismiss an ADA lawsuit against Netflix for failing to provide captions on much of the content it streams to subscribers.
Web-based businesses did not exist when the disabilities act was enacted in 1990, the judge wrote, but the US Congress intended the law to adapt to changes in technology, and it should apply to websites.
» via Boston.com
Netflix Subscribers Watched 1 Billion Hours Of Video In June, Or More Than An Hour A Day On Average
Here’s more evidence that Netflix is slowly chipping away at traditional TV viewing. According to a public Facebook post by CEO Reed Hastings, Netflix subscribers watched a total of 1 billion hours of video for the first time in June. Do a little back-of-the-envelope math, and that comes out to more than an hour of video per subscriber each day.
» via TechCrunch
“The case involves a Cyberlaw perennial: are websites obligated to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (the ADA)? In this case, the desired accommodation is close-captioning for Netflix-streamed video. If websites must comply with the ADA, all hell will break loose. Could YouTube be obligated to close-caption videos on the site? (This case seems to leave that door open.) Could every website using Flash have to redesign their sites for browsers that read the screen? I’m not creative enough to think of all the implications, but I can assure you that ADA plaintiffs’ lawyers will have a long checklist of items worth suing over. Big companies may be able to afford the compliance and litigation costs, but the entry costs for new market participants could easily reach prohibitive levels.”
“Turns out, Netflix streamers watch just as much traditional TV as non-streamers,” Juenger wrote in his report. “However, there is a significant share shift among streamers. Kids’ networks (not just Nickelodeon) and syndicated shows are getting severely whacked.”
“One of the reasons our focus in the recommendation algorithms has changed is because Netflix as a whole has changed dramatically in the last few years. Netflix launched an instant streaming service in 2007, one year after the Netflix Prize began. Streaming has not only changed the way our members interact with the service, but also the type of data available to use in our algorithms. For DVDs our goal is to help people fill their queue with titles to receive in the mail over the coming days and weeks; selection is distant in time from viewing, people select carefully because exchanging a DVD for another takes more than a day, and we get no feedback during viewing. For streaming members are looking for something great to watch right now; they can sample a few videos before settling on one, they can consume several in one session, and we can observe viewing statistics such as whether a video was watched fully or only partially.”
