14 DAY TRIAL // Netflix has already been available on the Xbox 360 for quite some time and there are a lot of people using the streaming service to watch movies and television shows. And, for quite some time, there have been rumors, some of them generated by announcements for open jobs at the company, that Netflix is laboring on getting the service working on the other current-generation consoles, the Nintendo Wii and the PlayStation 3. Now, the Chief Executive Officer of the company has pretty much confirmed the move, although he has not stated when it might be completed.
Reed Hastings has told Reuters that, “Eventually we want to be on all the game consoles, all the Blu-ray players, all the Internet TVs. So we are working in parallel with all of those efforts. Currently our Xbox deal is exclusive and we haven’t characterized it more than that.”
He has been speaking at the ceremony where Netflix has awarded the one-million-dollar prize it has instituted for the team that improves its movie-recommendation algorithm. Hastings is seeing an explosion in the market for movie streaming on a variety of devices, which will grow to include the iPhone and other mobile devices, but he says that, at the moment, the company he heads is focusing on delivering its services to TVs, home gaming consoles and Blu-ray drives.
It will be interesting to see how Netflix deals with the Nintendo Wii, the console that is seen as being the least powerful of the current-gen lot. Still, getting movie streaming on all the three platforms will help Netflix by increasing its potential customer base three fold.
Recently, there has been good news for both Netflix and gamers from the Federal Communications Commision, which has acknowledged the principle of net neutrality. This basically means that services that take up a lot of bandwidth, like the digital distribution of video games, streaming of Netflix movies and multiplayer gaming, cannot be in any way limited by Internet providers.