Netflix Video Streaming Coming to iPhone Too

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Netflix has been getting a lot of attention for its new iPad app that lets users not only manage their queue, but also stream movies and TV shows to Apple’s new tablet. But it looks like you might not need to pick up an iPad to get that feature. Netflix has pretty much said that the app is on its way to the iPhone and iPod touch as well.

There’s no word on how long we’ll have to wait. But Netflix has already done the hard part. Previously, you need a computer with the Silverlight plugin to stream Netflix “watch instantly” videos. The Apple iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch don’t support that plugin (or Adobe Flash), so Netflix had to retool the video streaming service to use HTML5 and other web standards that are available on these mobile devices.

This post republished from Mobiputing.

4 thoughts on “Netflix Video Streaming Coming to iPhone Too”

  1. Isn’t this just an implementation of what Scott Gu showed at the PDC last year. IIS streaming as H.264 to an iPhone?

  2. Yeah, I’m not sure and had a similar thought. Since it’s an app, they can bypass the browser and HTML5 to stream H.264 directly. But whatever they’ve figured out has to be locked down in some way (or obfuscated) though, so folks don’t swipe the streams (from a computer).

    Update: After reading Engadget’s hands on, it may be using the Safari engine to bring it to life. Hm. Either way, HTML5 and H.264 are not mutually exclusive. :)

  4. I don’t think this necessarily has anything to do with HTML 5. Its an app. It doesn’t need to use a rendering engine. I don’t know enough about iPhone/iPad development to be able to figure out if you can do VC-1 decoding in software on the iPad or not, but the most obvious choice would be h.264 video, using Apple’s streaming methodology–e.g. taking an MP2TS and cutting it into 2second chunks, encoding the chunks at different bit rates, etc. Similar to how all of the progressive streaming codecs are doing things. But anyway, you can clearly decode such things even on the iPhone so I’m sure you can do it on the iPad in an app. Probably there is some kind of DRM wrapped around the packets, or at least some percentage of them. You don’t have to scramble all of the packets to make it largely useless–just the IDR-frames, one every two seconds, would pretty much do the job. Would be interesting to sniff the stream and figure out what they’re doing… or just wait for netflix to blog about it…

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