This is already possible via any netbook or tablet -- via the browser, at netflix.com. I've been watching streaming Netflix videos this way on my laptop for a long while.
Are we honestly going to get hyped up about every last feature of existing services that an iPad application replicates?
What you're seeing is that people are starting to realize that this device can do the vast majority of things that people want to do on their computers. And with nearly none of the time/cognitive/frustration burden of a "computer" -- notice how "normals" don't think of the iPad as a "computer": they think of it as... well, an iPad. Normals don't want computers but they want what computers can do.
Yes. The entire appeal of the iPad isn't, 'This can do a great many of the things that my computer can already do!' it's, 'This makes it so much more pleasant to do [X] than it is on a computer!'
So every new feature that we see demonstrated isn't just filling in a little bit more of the difference between an iPad and a netbook; it's bringing the experience of the iPad to the tasks and behavior we're looking for.
This is the way that innovation happens, even though a lot of people don't realize it. They're stuck in the old mode of innovation, the King's Quest VI mode. The first time I saw a CGI video playing off a CD-ROM I was blown away by the capabilities of computers. By now I know what computers can do, and I have seen enough CGI video to be pretty well-convinced that anything I want can be rendered by it. Likewise, we have enough technologies at our disposal right now that we could spend a long, long time improving the software that we use simply by designing better interfaces for it. If you wait around for an entirely new technology—something that isn't possible on your laptop, like Star Wars-style holograms—you're gonna miss several boats.
To put it more directly: there's surely some people who have already ordered the iPad who will be thinking, 'Oh, nice. There's another thing I can use it for.' But the story here is the many, many more people who are thinking, 'I love Netflix/Hulu/[whatever pre-existing service will be replicated next week], and if I could use it on a magic ultra-light wireless multi-touch slate, I'd buy one in a fucking second.'
This is a game changer for me. I told myself before that there is no way I would waste money on one of these. Now...maybe. I'm starting to get a feel for what is possible.
The Netflix app appears to be free unlike the Hulu app. Netflix already charges $5-10/mo. for access to their library so they can get away with offering this service at no additional cost.
Hulu is behind what with their users having grown accustomed to free content. Selling "mobile Hulu, only $X/month" is going to be a tough sell.
I'm wondering what technology Netflix is going to use to stream video to their app and how they're going to address studio's security concerns. IIRC, they were using Silverlight because it supported some encryption scheme that made everyone happy.
What’s even more interesting is that this wasn’t a skunkworks proof-of-concept project, Microsoft got the OK from Apple. This is in stark-contrast to Apple’s stance on Adobe Flash, which currently has plans for all mobile platforms except for the iPhone.
So according to Mashable, Apple is indeed allowing a runtime environment, running interpreted code on the iPhone, in direct contravention of the SDK guidelines (unlike Flash CS5, which is compiling native IPA binaries with nothing interpreted at runtime). Very weird.
"Then, using HTML 5’s <video> tag, Silverlight is able to communicate a QuickTime request to the IIS server, which then decodes the MPEG-2 v8 file dynamically and starts streaming it to the iPhone.
This is extremely similar to how YouTube content currently works with the iPhone. Because Silverlight already supports GPU acceleration (a feature that is coming to future versions of Flash Player 10), battery life and overall performance has the potential to be quite strong."
There was an article about this a while back (whose link I can't find).
Microsoft's Silverlight-to-iPhone streaming is basically 'Microsoft implemented in IIS Streaming Server a streaming standard the iPhone already supports'. It doesn't require any approval from Apple. It's just streaming h.264 over HTTP.
Nope. Only silverlight video streaming works on the iphone. They implemented Apple's http video protocol on the server side. Doesn't need Apple's permission for that. You can't run actual silverlight apps on the iPhone.
Bear in mind that Netflix streaming doesn't typically include the latest popular releases (hey, that's what iTunes Movie Store is for, right?) However, they do have a pretty decent selection of titles. At the moment, just over 25% of my nearly 50 queued movies are available for streaming.
I wonder how this is going to work...My 1st gen MacBook (with 2GB RAM) cannot handle my Netflix stream (1.21 MB/s maxed out on Time Warner). It chokes every few seconds.
Are we honestly going to get hyped up about every last feature of existing services that an iPad application replicates?