That Was Quick

Well, after saying earlier in the week that only a select few Mac users would be able to stream movies via Netflix, it looks like all of ‘em (that have an Intel chip, anyway) are welcome to play.  So sayeth their blog.  (Also, check out cnet, which is where I found out about it.)  Sounds good, other than having to use Silverlight.

Silverlight isn’t so bad in itself.  It’s good to have competition against Flash, though Flash is so ubiquitous.  But Adobe’s little spat with Apple vis-a-vis the iPhone is getting a little old, and it seems to be delaying deployment of Flash to smartphones in any meaningful way; yes, Adobe Lite is being used as interfaces on lots of cellphones, but getting sites like Youtube to work is a royal pain in the butt; surely, if I can watch television on my Treo 800w, and the Japanese can watch HD television on their cellphones, surely there can be a painless way to get Youtube to work properly.  And while they’re at it, how about getting Java to work on ‘em too?

Anyway, this wasn’t really supposed to be a slam against Adobe; I was talking about Silverlight.  I played with Silverlight, and it does interesting things, I suppose. My main criticism of it is that it seems to have a habit of creating all sorts of bogus directories on your hard drive (and your external hard drives) and then placing copies of the Silverlight install package in ‘em.  Huh?  How’s that a good thing?  I mean, they may only be five or six megs in size, each one, but it makes no sense to me.  Maybe it’s isolated to just me, and I didn’t bother looking for what else is out there about it before just uninstalling Silverlight and deleting all the folders, but, like my criticism of Chrome, I hate it when programs just do stupid stuff for no reason.  Hopefully, installing Silverlight on Macs won’t lead to the same issues, because we all know how Mac users are about Microsoft products, and Netflix isn’t really going to want to have to deal with a bunch of angries.

Getting Netflix on a Mac

As time goes on, I may begin to seem a little more critical of Macs than non-Macs.  Macs are gorgeous machines (if a little blah in the color-scheme; a guy can take only so much Bauhausian asceticism) and OSX is a very nice piece of work.  It certainly has a hell of a lot more bells and whistles than XP.  But, on the flip side, though Vista has its problems, it is a graphical improvement over XP, and as time has gone on, my experience is that the OS has sped up, not slowed down.  Probably an anomaly.  (In any event, does anyone really think that Microsoft couldn’t program a hell of an OS if it only had to worry about two or three pieces of hardware, was allowed to lock its OS to one hardware platform, and not offer it to the rest of the computing population?)

The point is: Macs aren’t perfect, and despite their touted advantage in A/V capabilities, watching streaming video on the internet has been difficult for Macs.  That has been especially true when it comes to watching streaming movies from Netflix.

The New York Times, and others, have reported that Netflix has found a solution for its Mac customers: Microsoft’s Silverlight.  That’s because Apple’s DRM positions got in the way, according to Netflix: “Apple does not license their DRM solution to third parties, which has made this more difficult, but we are working with the studios and content owners to gain approval for other solutions.”