An Open Letter to Netflix

I am not an unreasonable man and I full understand your need to focus on making your “watch now” feature debut available exclusively to Windows users. After all, they do make up about 90% of computer users. However, I do have some problems with this as a long time plan.

First of all, it does require me to use Internet Explorer. This is extremely shortsighted. What about those of us who use Firefox? My wife was excited about “watch now” until she found out that IE was required and said, “f&ck that!” So you should open up this service to other browsers.

Second, I use Linux as my main computer and my brother uses a macintosh for his main laptop. This effectively cuts us off from using this service. Sure, Linux and Mac users make up a combined 6% or so of the total computer user population, but these are fast growing categories and you risk alienating us from this service. Dell is now selling consumer computers with Linux preinstalled and Apple sales have been picked up, boosted by the iPod and iPhone.

I understand what your excuse will be - we need to use DRM to ensure that people will not copy the videos. The only secure DRM we were able to find was licensed from Microsoft. However, a quick search on Google will show you that people have already broken it. Then you will change it and they will break it again. You’re on the losing side of an never ending battle.

Shipping costs some amount of money so I can see that the more customers you get using the online services, the more profits go to Netflix. In the end you want everyone to do this instead of ordering DVDs. If you want to be successful at this you’re going to need to support all of the major platforms and browsers.