Netflix Axes Apple AirPlay Support (cnet.com) 169
If you stream Netflix on your iPhone or iPad, the app will no longer support Apple AirPlay. A report adds: This means that you won't be able to cast shows on Netflix from your iOS device to your Apple TV. Netflix's note says AirPlay is "no longer supported" due to "technical limitations." "With AirPlay support rolling out to third-party devices, there isn't a way for us to distinguish between devices (what is an Apple TV vs. what isn't) or certify these experiences. Therefore, we have decided to discontinue Netflix AirPlay support to ensure our standard of quality for viewing is being met," a Netflix spokesperson said in an email.
The big boys battle (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing to do with us.
Re:The big boys battle (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not sure why AirPlay is part of this fight. Apple Historically had the ability to a Companies biggest competitor and strongest strategic business partner at the same time. Yes Apple iTune services is in direct competition with Netflix, but using Apple Products (for those who like them) with Netflix, is a popular viewing method. Making Netflix harder to use on Apple Products, will make the product owners have to choose between getting new hardware, or switching services. Being that Netflix isn't in the business of selling Netflix boxes, that will mean a drop in customers for Netflix, as a good number (I expect 20%) would stick with Apple and Drop Netflix. Where if Netflix continued to play well with Apple Products, then there will be a smaller number of switchers where many would just buy into both services, and less would do a full switch.
The trick to Apples model is you have a physical device where there is an emotional attachment to, vs a service which you can drop without feeling bad about it.
Re: The big boys battle (Score:2)
Because Netflix will still work.. but Airplay wonâ(TM)t. People will blame Apple for that, public pressure will grow for Apple to cave. I just donâ(TM)t think that many people use AirPlay for this to work as well as Netflix wants with Bluetooth speakers, smart TVs, consoles etc in mix.
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Actually, AirPlay support is up to individual apps themselves. It's a really common requested feature as well - if you offer a streaming audio or video app, and don't offer AIrPlay, people will complain bitterly to y
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Netflix is only "controlling" because the content providers have it in their licensing agreement with Netflix. Things like region locks, and only allowing HD streaming to devices that support HDCP in every step of the chain is all in their licensing agreement with the content providers. It really is those guys you hate. Netflix tries to enforce those things because they are legally obligated to (or they don't get a license for much if any content at all).
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Nononono. It's called "Netflix needs to take on even more debt to pay Winona Ryder for Stranger Things Season 3".
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Spoken like a true AC and a thief. If you enjoy the content, be willing to pay for it. Don't tell content makers that their product is worthless.
"the ethics to pirate Netflix"? Good lord, I've never heard a more perverse use of the word ethics.
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They're not entirely wrong. (Score:2)
I recently tried to do Netflix AirPlay from my phone in a hotel. It was a very poor implementation of AirPlay on the hotel TV, and Netflix showed up with a blank solid coloured screen with only the audio playing. For that matter, no other video app worked either. YouTube just crashed, Crunchyroll froze, and Infuse played audio/video well enough but with chunky scaling, jittery motion, and no subtitles.
On the other hand, I'm not sure why that would stop Netflix from supporting AirPlay, since it presumably wo
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Re:They're not entirely wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
Presumably it has much more to do with being able to Airplay a perfectly viable compressed bitstream to an uncontrolled device that could be recording it or doing anything else with it (whereas Apple tended to respect the DRM etc.).
Airplay->MP4 anyone? I'm sure it's possible.
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Airplay->MP4 anyone? I'm sure it's possible.
It's possible. And it would be an AAC audio stream with H.264 video. You may choose to transcode back to something like AC3 for compatibility, but only if connecting to a 5.1 receiver.
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So is MP4->GIF, unfortunately.
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Re: They're not entirely wrong. (Score:3)
Netflix is glad to support airplay as long as they know their DRM/licenses will be properly enforced. They donâ(TM)t care about third parties so much as they canâ(TM)t guarantee that third parties will prevent piracy the way they want it done. Thatâ(TM)s a part of what this pissing match is about. That, and money of course.
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No they're doing it out of fear that if the companies that they license content from will blame the inevitable piracy on netflix's "inadequate" DRM and refuse to continue licensing their content.
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On the other hand, I'm not sure why that would stop Netflix from supporting AirPlay, since it presumably works fine on actual Apple devices.
Probably some company isn't paying some other company (enough) for something - to support or allow this.
Re: They're not entirely wrong. (Score:2)
Re: They're not entirely wrong. (Score:4, Informative)
The in-room TV did have direct support for a few streaming services (including Netflix), but I'm a bit hesitant to be entering my Netflix password on an untrusted public device.
Netflix still supports Chromecast, what part of your setup did they stop supporting?
Monopolization (Score:2, Interesting)
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the importance of free and open standards!
Standard of Ripping (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fake Excuse, DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
The "technical limitation" is that they don't want to send video to a device that can decrypt and archive it.
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Or their agreements with movie studios require that.
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I guess their agreements with movie studios forbid that. ;-P
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I'm with you, and some people would probably get upset. But those people would probably get even MORE upset when Netflix either had to a) hike up prices because new agreements with more flexibility will cost more or b) let a whole bunch of content disappear from their service.
And those people who get upset when your prices rise because your cost of business goes up through actions beyond your control? Those are the most problematic customers anyway, in my experience. You may very well be better off witho
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It's not transparency that annoys people, it's complexity.
What happens when the cost of materials/supplies goes up? Do you add an "inflation fee" too?
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This is getting a little off-topic, but I doubt they do that. Customers understand that things like the cost of materials and supplies goes up over time, and will accept that in increases in the base price. I can certainly understand the logic (although I may not agree with it 100%). Tariffs and increased tax rates may be just temporary things, and I'd rather see that in a separate line-item than bundled into an overall price number. It makes it easy to do, and easy to understand if, as the poster sugges
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Mr. Station Owner, the cost of the gasoline ALREADY IN YOUR TANKS didn't change from when it was delivered.
The cost of the gasoline in their tanks might be less than they have to sell it for. You have to sell based on futures pricing, and have it even out in volume and incidental purchases at an attached convenience store. Also, if their tank isn't totally empty when they get more gasoline in, they would have to calculate how much to raise the price and raise it instantly while people might be in the middle of pumping. Usually for price increases, the sign on the street changes before the price on the pump an
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Most likely a balance of covering their losses from when they had to sell low, response time of competitors on the price change, and that these changes likely come from corporate (except when competitors drop first).
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Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not blaming this on the actual station owners. I shouldn't have said that. But, if the industry wants to claim "we sell based on futures pricing", and the time delay on price decreases is longer after a futures price decrease than the time delay on price increases after a futures price increase, I call BS. The consumer is getting ripped off. You can't have it both ways.
I tracked this for a full six months once, correlating the futures prices to the pump prices, because
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I said it was based on it, I didn't say it was 1:1. "Ripped off" just means profit. It's not like the average consumer has their own supply chain - and oil pipelines have enforced a sort of natural monopoly.
But the fact is, refineries probably bring in more oil when prices are low, but sell it off very fast. After a price increase, it takes a lot longer to get rid of what's in storage tanks because there's lower demand.
Either way, you can look at publicly traded gas station chains and see that their prof
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Unfortunately a lot of socialists don't understand basic economics.
Unfortunately a lot of capitalists also don't understand basic economics either.
The real issue with listing those costs is when the company tries to disguise a cost of doing business expense as a government mandated fee or tax. Not saying you or your company did this, but the telecom sector is really good at it. Plus those fees never seem to disappear from the cable bill.
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Umm, that's not how running a business works. You're essentially saying "If the government raises your tax liability, Mr. Company, you should just suck it up and make less money (or perhaps go from a profit to a loss, depending on the situation). We don't care that it costs you more to provide the same service/product."
I have been involved in two real-world businesses, and seen this sort of thing happen to my competitors. You know what happens to businesses that suck up ever additional cost and
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We hate when you pretend your tax liability is somehow our problem.
Why? You may very well have voted for the people that imposed these taxes. So here are the consequences. Don't like them? Vote differently next time.
Re:Fake Excuse, DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey Netflix, I’ll tell you what a piss-poor user experience really is: having a setup that used to work flawlessly but suddenly shows a big unfriendly HDCP error when trying to play Netflix content, leaving me to randomly unplug, power cycle, and reconnect all devices in the chain for 15 minutes until the message disappears. I’ll tell you one thing: I don’t get any of that crap when dealing with the Pirate Bay.
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I’ll tell you one thing: I don’t get any of that crap when dealing with the Pirate Bay.
I'll tell you one thing, if you just use decent HDMI cables you'll probably never get this error. HDMI has poor fault tolerance and basically treats any hiccup as an attack. I've never once had an HDCP error since that protocol became the norm.
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Not at all - bargain-priced Monoprice cables for me, usually. You can't go by price to tell if something is good.
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Just FYI, optical will not transmit DD+ or HD audio - not enough bandwidth. Standard AC3 over optical is probably good enough for most people if all the equipment will handle that and not drop all the way down to stereo.
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Is Netflix DRM really so bad? I watch Netflix regularly, and I do it on my laptop, on my phone, on my tablet, on Chromecast. I have not had to buy any special gadgets except the Chromecast - and I could even skip that and watch Netflix on my PS4 or connect the TV to my laptop if I wanted to be masochistic. The whole setup just works - pretty much all the time - and I have access to an order magnitude more entertainment than what I actually have time for, between Netflix and a few other streaming services.
Ma
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It it doesn’t work that way. Casting instructs the Apple TV (or Xbox for that matter) to directly play the stream, not to route it via the casting device.
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And that means there has to be a protocol that the receiving device can use to retrieve the video that ultimately requires a level of trust in the device. Handing the decryption keys to the device by either method means the device could intercept and store the stream.
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the folks that Netflix should be concerned about are recording their content out the wazoo
Netflix has no vested interest in true security - just the illusion of security. The only thing they have to lose is content licensing deals, and their current level of security works fine to keep that.
Touche, Apple, touche (Score:2)
What is the use case? (Score:2)
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Credentials sharing. I'm wiling to send a video stream from my device to the Hotel TV (though, given the sophistication of malware these days, any interaction might be unsafe). But there's no way in hell I want to put my Netflix credentials into some random hotel device.
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Re:What is the use case? (Score:4, Funny)
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What is the use case that requires AirPlay support to cast Netflix to a device? What AirPlay receiver doesn't already have a Netflix client?
My use case is streaming to other people's AppleTVs without logging them out of their Netflix applications and entering my own credentials. For me, this happens when I go to visit family (holidays etc), or houses shared with other parts of my family. It also happens on hotels - I'd rather not have to remember to log out when checking out.
It's something I need a couple of times a year, and unfortunately I needed it last weekend - first weekend by the sea this year, as the snow and winter are finally gone
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Elite level corporate doublespeak (Score:3)
That's some elite level corporate doublespeak. I wonder what would happen if a big company stopped shamelessly lying and just told the truth?
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I wonder what would happen if a big company stopped shamelessly lying and just told the truth?
As Jack Nicholson once famously said, "The truth! You can't handle the truth!"
End communication.
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Which evoke a couple more: "perverse incentive."
Netflix also "disables" screenshots on iOS (Score:2)
I'm not surprised by this. Netflix is anal retentive about DRM.
Sometime last year Netflix "disabled" the ability to take screenshots on the iOS app. I put "disabled" in quotes because "technically" it still works but effectively it is broken. Captions will show (if you have them on) but you now get a black screen. REALLY? You are fucking worried about a *single frame* ??? Apparently these idiots don't understand the concept of "free advertising" when a user shares a single frame with others generating in
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You have to realize that Netflix still has to make deals to get any content they don't produce themselves, and that means getting the other side to agree to those deals. It may very well be that language prohibiting these types of things is written into those agreements.
As far as using a phone or camera to take a shot of something you're watching on a tablet, the good old "analog loophole" will always be there, since it's pretty close to impossible, if not actually impossible, to close that loophole. At l
Netflix "agreements" with itself (Score:2)
You have to realize that Netflix still has to make deals to get any content they don't produce themselves, and that means getting the other side to agree to those deals. It may very well be that language prohibiting these types of things is written into those agreements.
But why should these restrictions affect Netflix originals? Do the agreements between the streaming division of Netflix and the video production division of Netflix have the same restrictions, and if so, why?
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Many, if not most, of those restrictions (DRM, screenshots, device count, VPN, regional restrictions, subtitles, display aspect, etc) are not coming from Netflix themselves. Instead, they usually come from the licensing agreements they make with the 3rd-party content providers. It's a lot easier, from a legal perspective and potential user-confusion, to just make all those restrictions simply apply to all content, rather than try to selectively enforce them.
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Exactly. It's one of those cases where the deals Netflix signed with the studios basically say that "You will not allow this video to play on hardware that does not support HDCP" or something. Since there's no way for Netflix to know whether your AirPlay-compatible device isn't just some box that collects the video, they could held liable.
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It's not even that the ad revenue is enticing. It's necessary.
If Netflix has a successful show, or licenses one, then its success makes it more expensive.
Licensing agreements demand viewing data, and when Netflix reveals something has been watched 20 million times, they'll want more money for the next agreement. Or they'll want money per view.
For Netflix's own content, they have to pay to produce it. When actors learn that their show or movie is successful, they demand more money for the next season / th
DRM is the real (and only reason) (Score:1)
The real, and only reason is the lack of DRM in that path.
It is a fact that lots of Apple-TV-but-not-really devices are utter crap. But that's also true for Android screen casting, etc. It is to be expected, it has never been a problem.
The fact that you can stream it to an *-tv device that just encodes it back apparently is.
Not Netflix's fault (Score:5, Insightful)
The Hollywood movie studios are the ones requiring the streamed movie be locked down . Hollywood's fear is that if an unencrypted video stream is ever exposed, that you'll just capture the stream to make a copy of the movie. So they require the stream to remain encrypted all the way from Netflix's servers to the final display device.
If it's a dedicated video playback device, then the device (and playback software like the Netflix app) has to be submitted to Hollywood for approval. That's why the Netflix app showed up on iPhones first, then on the different Android handsets one at a time. Netflix had to submit their app on every single hardware device to Hollywood for their approval. The iPhones were first because approving them meant the most people could get Netflix for the fewest models needing approval. Then the more popular Android handsets, followed by the lesser-known Android handsets. Every streaming device has to go through the same approval process - smart TVs, Blu-ray players with streaming capability, PS4, Xbox, etc.
For general purpose computing devices (i.e. PCs), Hollywood requires the video stream be decoded inside an encrypted virtual machine, which then sends the decoded video directly to the GPU for display. This is why you needed Flash or Silverlight installed on your browser in the pre-HTML 5 days. Those were the only technologies allowing the construction of a virtual machine. And decoding the video in a virtual machine precludes using the hardware decoder in the GPU, which is why you used to need at least an i3 to decode streamed 1080p video, while the puny little SoC on your phone could also stream it (the phone wasn't considered a general purpose computing device, so it could get Hollywood's approval for the entirety of the phone hardware, allowing it to use the GPU to decode the stream).
This is why the Netflix app won't run if your phone is rooted. Hollywood considers that to be converting your phone from a dedicated hardware device to a general purpose computing device. So if the Netflix app detects your phone is rooted, it invalidates itself and won't play. (You can get around it by hiding root from the Netflix app.)
Since Hollywood's approval was only for Airplay to certain Apple devices, opening up AirPlay violates Hollywood's terms of approval. So Netflix is forced to discontinue support for AirPlay, unless they want to go through the trouble of submitting every possible display device you can connect to using AirPlay.
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I worked in the music industry. Similar constraints there which were severely limiting too.
Like the one where we had to protect our binaries with an obfuscating compiler on desktop. One that would create bad code from time to time, crash on some constructs and not support "modern" (aka C++11) standards. It took a while to get that changed. But on iOS? Everything was fine and dandy.
Chromecast (Score:1)
Then how does Netflix get away with bouncing to a Chromecast? You can plug a Chromecast into anything, right? A bunch of TVs have those built in.
In any case, I'm pretty sure Apple is under the same, or similar, restrictions as Netflix as far as streaming movies through AirPlay goes. Seems to work for them just fine.
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You can plug a Chromecast into anything, right?
Anything that can negotiate a secure connection between the Chromecast dongle and the display device over the HDMI port.
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So what's the difference?
Too many 3rd party apps and devices out there for Netflix to keep track of them. Particularly if it's Apple managing the connections. Netflix may not be able to certify proper DRM function through Apple, so they just dropped the support.
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You've been able to save AirPlay streams for a while now.
There's even software that advertises this specific use case, airserver.com - that've been doing it for years now.
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Except HDCP (up to at least 1080p content) is a totally busted encryption protocol. The master keys where reverse engineered years ago. You can just go onto eBay and purchase a HDMI capture device stick it between a device and the TV and record everything being played.
In other words... (Score:1)
I think it's fair, (Score:2)
In other words... (Score:2)
Petty DRM squabbles (Score:3)
You know, whenever I see ridiculous DRM squabbles like this, my immediate reaction is to want to crack it, just cause.
There have been a few times that I've bought material (usually from smaller artists) where their entire DRM scheme was a sentence that said, "We would greatly appreciate it if you don't share our stuff." And I haven't.
These same artists also tend to get far more repeat business from me too, including one where I bought their entire discography without even listening to the songs first.
It's funny/sad how not being jerked around has become a genuine feature I look for (and will pay a premium for) in my purchases now.
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Family members complained that my cousin was eligible for free coffee where we work, for himself, but not for family members. In the same conversation they said the coffee shop did not give him enough hours. This is average America folks. They can't possibly be bothered to con
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Wow! For years, I have read your usename as Its a Loving (thinking it was a wordplay on its a living) but just now, after ALL this time, I see it as Ilsa Loving. I just did a Google search to see if it was someone famous that I should know and I find an IT manager type from Quebec. That is pretty neat.
What changed this time? So weird. Sorry for this interruption in your daily scheduled routine. Carry on carrying on. I just felt the need to share this odd incident. :)
Ha! Netflix, this is not about VIEWING QUALITY! (Score:2)
Nice try Netflix, this is not about viewing quality, this is about DRM, controlling content, and controlling users streams.
What if someone streams to a Mac or PC running Air Parrot and then records the stream, oh the horrors.
( https://www.airsquirrels.com/a... [airsquirrels.com] )
It looks like Apple won't enforce your DRM because you won't pay them for using their platform.
( https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/18... [9to5mac.com] )
It is so sad when the big boys can't share their toys. :(
You should have wrote a big article reading, "Apple is taking
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The agreements that allow Netflix to carry programming produced by entities other than Netflix include a requirement for Netflix to behave as a standards body with respect to compliance and robustness [wikipedia.org].
Tethering surcharge (Score:2)
just get an appleTV or comparable device and you'll be better off.
That fails when your cellular ISP charges more for bytes sent to and received from an Apple TV device than for bytes sent to and received from an app running on the iPhone. People had been using AirPlay to avoid a tethering surcharge.