Somehow I missed this piece in Variety that reveals Netflix’s plan to launch an Internet-enabled, proprietary set-top box that allows its customers to receive downloadable movies overnight. But thanks to Brian Ward at The Deal’s TechEffect blog, I’m on the case now.
And it’s a pretty lame case. Why Netflix thinks yet another specialized add-on set-top box will ever fly is beyond me. Haven’t they heard of MovieBeam, the Disney-founded over-the-air subscription film service that requires customers to install a $99 set-top box to receive premium movies?
Brian raises a series of skeptical questions about the snail-mail movie company’s attempt to transform itself into a broadband-powered, set-top based distributor. The most important one of which is:
Will this move make Netflix a direct competitor to on-demand services the cable companies offer?
Um, yeah, you think? A Netflix box would be a direct (although laughably ineffective) assault on the dominant video providers. For that reason you can bet that cable operators and satellite providers would throw up as many technical barriers as possible to make the Netflix box a totally crappy, troublesome and just-not-worth-it piece of electronics.
Cynthia Brumfield at 5:49 PM|Comments(0)
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