Instant Netflix on the Mac: FINALLY!!!

I have always been frustrated, like many Mac users, that Netflix Instant Watching didn’t work on Macs. I was working at Netflix when they (we?) released Instant Watching. And while I fully understood WHY it was available on a PC and not a Mac, I also understood personally how frustrating it was for Mac users. The saving grace was that in spite of the shouts from disgruntled customers about it (often saying irrational things like we Netflix folks hated Mac users – which as a Mac user I found inaccurate and sort of irritating), I totally knew how hard my co-workers were applying themselves to get that feature available and out this year. I understood that the effort it was going to take was somewhat disproportionate the economic benefit to the company* – it was being done because it was the right thing to do. But it wasn’t going to be easy.

I left Netflix in May and gave back my company laptop; suddenly on my own personal MacBook, I was bumming again and trying to wait patiently until the feature was going to be released. I knew it would take months to launch – among other hurdles, every one of the 12,000 odd titles in the ever-growing Instant Watching library had to be totally re-encoded to play in a format for Macs, and not just once but in multiple different resolutions.

But this morning they finished and released the feature; Unmitigated Joy!

Netflix Instant Watching now works on the Mac platform, natively. (Press Release) It is being rolled out slowly, starting now, and should be available to all Mac-using accounts (Intel-Macs only, sorry Nick) "by the end of the year." Using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, the system is easy to set-up and works pretty much as well as the PC version did. I spent months using the PC version, and more months using a MacBook Pro running Parallels and Boot Camp… and Windows… ugh. But now it couldn’t be easier and I’m really very happy about it.


* Only a minority (but not inconsequential number) of customers are Mac users, and only a fraction of those are interested in Instant Watching, so in the end it amounted to building a feature for a reasonably small – although growing – group of people.

Oh, and I hope I never see this friggin' notice on my MacBook again...