from the we-don't-need-no-stinkin'-DVDs dept.
Remember when you could watch Netflix videos without an internet connection? With something called "DVDs"?
Well, now you can again, and you don't even need those circular shiny things. Netflix has finally made movies and TV shows available to download, so you can watch them offline, whenever you want, wherever you are.
In IT Blogwatch, we can't decide what to binge watch first.
So what exactly is going on? Laura Roman has the background:
On Wednesday, Netflix announced and implemented...the ability to download TV and movie titles on mobile devices.
...
At no extra cost...Netflix subscribers will now be able to save select content to their iOS or Android devices, then watch on the go without the need for an internet connection. Say goodbye to...in-flight movies, Netflix is now airplane-mode compatible.
Related Stories
Netflix's foray into original content is paying off:
[Rather] than pay money out to studios for the right to show existing content, it instead ploughed its cash into shows such as Stranger Things, The Crown, Luke Cage and the remake of Gilmore Girls. In 2016, those "Netflix Originals" - already a term you could argue has become synonymous with quality - came thick and fast. The firm said it produced 600 hours of original programming last year - and intends to raise that to about 1,000 hours in 2017. Its budget to achieve that is $6bn - a billion more than last year.
On Wednesday we learned the company has been rewarded handsomely for putting its eggs in the original content basket. After hours trading on Wednesday saw the company's stock rise by as much as 9% on the news it had added 7.05 million new subscribers in the last three months of 2016. That's far greater than the 5.2 million they had anticipated, and left them ending the year with 93.8 million subscribers in total - and an expectation of breaking the symbolic 100 million mark by the end of March. In all, 2016 saw Netflix take in $8.83bn in revenue - with a profit of $186.7m.
Also at USA Today, TechCrunch, and Reuters.
Previously: Chris Rock Reportedly Signs $40 Million Deal With Netflix for Two Comedy Specials
Netflix Throws In the Towel On China
Netflix Lets Users Watch Videos Offline -- No DVDs Required
(Score: 4, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:01AM
My concerns is if it is something like an MP4 that will play on anything, or is it some proprietary format that must be played on some proprietary player software.
Once I use proprietary software, I am also forced to accept whatever snags that software has in it, while being legally required to hold him harmless for what he does in my machine.
Not only that, if his player enforces things like requiring me to agree to things or forces ads on me, I have to forfeit any enjoyment I would have gotten from the content if I refuse to obey the demands the software places on me.
Too many marketers pull fast ones these days. I will hold my horses on this one until I see if it is really an improvement, or yet another way of forcing obedience from me.
I remember passing up on a lot of DVR's I saw in WalMart because they would not record the content in a standard format, instead I was being cooed into buying some machine that would enforce its business model on me - at my expense. If it did not encode a standard .MP4 file, I really had no use for the thing. Just as I have no use for a keyboard that does not support ASCII.
If any of us buy into this, we agree to obey whatever crap the player may demand of us in order to watch the movie.
Far as I am concerned, its like buying olives with the pit still in 'em when I can get pitted olives just as easy.
Not .mp4? No sale.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Informative) by r1348 on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:34AM
I assume it will have some DRM built in, and yes you can only watch it with the proprietary app... like anything on Netflix. The file format is irrelevant.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:39AM
this. Netflix has made convenience sufficient, the community doesn't feel the need to crack it.
We all know their catalogue ebbs and flows...so we've come to terms with what we need to acquire elsewhere....
This is neat for flying though - they make their own stuff, which for an 2x4 hour flight is pretty decent.
Let's not forget the airlines charge $10/min for wifi....(ok maybe $10 a flight, but they wont let you access Netflix - united want you to use their buggy app to access *their* catalogue...).
So all in all, a +ve move....
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 03 2016, @06:45PM
Netflix has been cracked in the past as a source of 4K rips.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:24PM
ah ok. I hadn't been following because *mumble mumble* online sources....
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:17AM
Well, isn't it obvious?
...and only those devices. It's DRM'ed. Of course it's DRM'ed. And frankly, there's nothing wrong with this: Netflix is a subscription service, not a purchase-oriented marketplace.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:25AM
I will put this another way... Its not that I am concerned with paying a maid to clean my house... rather my main concern is that the maid may acquire information about my personal things, business affairs, whatever, while having access to the inside of my house, then sell that info on the open market. Or maybe once in my house, she duplicates my admission credentials so they can return uninvited anytime they want. Or start wasting my time with ads.
Its just getting too risky for my blood to admit business-backed softwares into my machine, as I simply do not trust it. Having pages of EULA/disclaimers tucked away in a little window tells me immediately this business has a lot of things they may do to me that they are claiming legal protection against my recourse.
Many businesses have betrayed customer trust big-time in an effort to monetize information they glean from their customer's machines, often without the customer's knowledge.
Or they use their admission to my machine to carry out wish-lists for others. Like nuking FTDI chips.
Even the nation's biggest businesses will stoop to this. Demonstrably. A lot of us permit ourselves to be treated this way. Some of us get madder than hell when someone goes out of their way to get in our machines to glean data, insert advertising, or wreak havoc.
In reaction, many customers ( myself included ), are very leery of running business-provided executables in our machines.
Especially with this new-fangled DMCA law out which forbids us from reading the code and determining what it does. To some of us, this is like handing us a legally-binding contract for our signature ( click "I accept" ), while making the reading of that contract illegal. Even illegal for others who can read it to warn us of its misleading content. Unless that, too, comes from businesses authorized to do so.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:46AM
So... For those people with phones and tablets that don't allow sd cards and have limited space, will there be offline video with sufficient quality to make it worthwhile? On my laptop I'd rather pirate stuff to watch offline anyway, fuck messing around with user agents and plugins to watch stuff on Netflix, and I'm definitely not installing any special Netflix software for what mplayer+transmission already do.
(Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Saturday December 03 2016, @12:00PM
A one hour TV show sans-commercials ends up as a 350mb download on pirate pay. It's not 720p, but you're not watching it in a home theater, either.
I'd definitely do this and download 10 episodes at 3.5GB onto a tablet (for plane/car trips). It's not like I use the space for much of anything else.
(Score: 2) by Jiro on Saturday December 03 2016, @05:51PM
With H265 a one hour show at 720p is normally below 350MB. Of course, H265 is patented out the wazoo, but if you're pirating anyway, this isn't going to matter.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @07:09PM
That's about 4-5 years out of date; for a long time, scene releases were sized to fit neatly on CD-Rs, or for some standards, DVD-Rs, so you could fit 2x 350MB on a 700MB CD-R; 720p releases at that time were generally 1.1 GB to fit 4x in a single-layer DVD-R, or for cable shows (full hour, no ads) at 1.47GB for 3x.
Today, that sort of fixed-size rule only applies to SD XviD releases, which aren't quite dead yet, but aren't really relevant anymore. More recent x264 rules (since 2011-2012) specify constant-quality encoding, so a 1-hour show would be released in SD with a file size anywhere from 200 to 400 MB depending on content, with an average of about 270MB. The corresponding 720p release would range from about 700 MB to 1.5GB, with an average about 850MB.
I don't presently mess around with x265, but those releases are even smaller for the same quality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @06:54PM
That's what I was thinking. Why watch a movie on a 3"x5" screen? Unless you have perfect vision and even if you do, it's not the same experience as watching on a larger screen. Too much detail is lost unless you use a magnifying glass. I also don't get high resolution screens on small phones. What's the point?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:40AM
That's what I was thinking. Why watch a movie on a 3"x5" screen? Unless you have perfect vision and even if you do, it's not the same experience as watching on a larger screen.
Sure, it's not the same experience. But until you can roll up a larger screen and stuff it in your pocket, there will be some people who accept "not the same experience" in exchange for "lugging less stuff".
I also don't get high resolution screens on small phones. What's the point?
Even if you can't see every pixel (and some of us can), text at the same physical size is more legible with smaller pixels. At some point it's not worth it, because higher resolution does cost money, processing power, and battery usage, but there is a real upside.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @09:33PM
By messing around with user agents and plugins you mean "install Chrome", right? That's all you need for Netflix on Linux these days.
(Score: 2) by Refugee from beyond on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:57AM
Can I really download or is that a glorified buffering in a DRM wrapping?
Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Saturday December 03 2016, @05:50PM
The latter.
But some people are stuck on Internet plans costing $5 to $10 per GB with ways around it. For example, one may have satellite Internet that's $5 per GB for most of the day but unmetered from 1 AM to 5 AM local time. Or one may subscribe to a combination of cable and cellular Internet, which is $10 per GB while away from home but $0.06 per GB at home or at affiliated hotspots (e.g. xfinitywifi). This sort of user-managed buffering would be ideal for users with such highly variable data transfer costs.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Saturday December 03 2016, @09:12PM
But some people are stuck on Internet plans costing $5 to $10 per GB with ways around it. For example, one may have satellite Internet that's $5 per GB for most of the day but unmetered from 1 AM to 5 AM local time.
I'm currently stuck on that sort of connection. Satellite internet, 10GB/mo cap for most of the day, but an extra "allowance" outside of that between 2am and 8am. Doesn't charge extra for going over, but once you go past the cap it's basically dialup speeds, so internet use sucks for most of the day.
From that perspective, this new Netflix feature is great. Not everything is available for download, and it's only on mobile devices (bleck), but it's the difference in being able to download something and watch it when I feel like vs. only being able to watch in an inconvenient, narrow window. Now if I want to watch something I check if I can download it first.
Since I've actually used it, I'll also add some notes about how it works for anyone interested:
• You can choose video quality (SD or HD) for downloads in the settings, giving you some control over bandwidth and storage use.
• For SD quality streams, the downloads have been somewhere in the 200-300MB range per 40-odd minute video.
• There's a fixed limit on how much you can have downloaded at a time. Not sure if it's based on video time, disk space, or number of downloads though; haven't used it enough to tell yet.
• I've heard that once you start watching a video, the download will "expire" after a set time regardless of whether you completed it or not. I haven't run into this yet myself.
• There's a category now that only displays downloadable content.
• Unfortunately, there isn't a clear indication of whether content is downloadable at a glance. You have to select a show or movie and then check for the download button.
• The lack of support outside of Android and iOS apps sucks, but it may be temporary. If not, at least there are HDMI adapters.
• The DRM complaint about the downloads is moot. If you're that uptight about it then the Netflix service, the Netflix app, or the OS req (Android or iOS) will be a deal breaker before the download encryption is even a concern.
Other than the lack of convenient visual indication of downloadable status on the "my list" and searches, it's probably as good a system as Netflix can manage while still having to keep the content distributors happy. People that want to complain will find a reason to complain and the people already using Netflix anyway just get a nice new thing that may be useful. I suspect that having a few movies downloaded will make a nice backup plan for things like internet outages, or times like a few months ago when a bad storm took out the power here for hours.