Netflix: Good News & Bad News on Silverlight Adoption
Filed Under (News Links) by Andy on 14-12-2008
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Good News:
Netflix adopted Silverlight to act as their platform for streaming movies via the browser on Windows and Mac PCs. One of their VPs recently announced on the company blog that the Silverlight adoption has resulted in a better user experience with fewer technical problems to be solved – that’s the good news.
Bad News:
As the VP reports, the bad news is that the improved user experience has resulted in Netflix needing 50 fewer Tech Support employees…so Netflix is trimming the support staff in January.
Merry Frakking Christmas! 
What an odd thing to announce in the company’s blog in the tone that it was given in (almost as a point of pride), I hope those 50 folks get an opportunity to stay on at the company in another capacity, that would be a better PR move than this announcement.
While the announcement is interesting yet odd, the comments responding to it are even better. Some of the anonymous comments seem to have more details on the layoffs and may be from insiders.
[found on Jim O'Neil's MSDN blog]
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It seems odd that they announce everything is so great, so soon after saying they got the Ruko and <a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10113937-93.html” target=”_blank”XBox problems fixed. Personally my XBox streaming experience has not improved; the movie starts with four bars and the connection state resets to one bar after the first five minutes of any movie. Looking at the replied on the Netflix blog, I’m not the only one.
As always, thanks for the great articles Andy!
Hmm, Silverlight means the only browser I can use is also form MS? Its not like there have been any problems with IE recently….
Dear Team, I would prefer not to have all the eggs in one basket.
Thanks
KF – Silverlight is a cross platform plugin, supports multiple non-MS browsers on PCs and Macs as well as mobile platforms like Symbian. Last i heard there’s a linux version coming as well called ‘moonlight’. Think of Silverlight as a competitor to Flash.