Hasta La Gadget!

Over the weekend, the CPO of Netflix wrote on the company blog that the delays experienced by users of the streaming service over the last few months is not Netflix’s fault and instead blames the traffic irregularities of ISP providers and ‘playback devices.’

Problems with video streaming from Netflix (on PCs and set top boxes) started in early November, when users of the Netflix-enabled Roku box started seeing a loss in quality and low bit rates. Among the reasons noted by Roku at the time was a change in the content distribution network (CDN) used by Netflix.

Weeks later, the glitch and slow streaming was mostly fixed but ever since, users seem to have become more vigilant of the problem, and a good number of them are still not pleased. Most notably, audio has been noted to be out of sync is Roku streams.

Netflix’s Neil Hunt says that people need to understand the weird discrepancies between streaming rates occur because "different titles, and different encodes for different playback device types, may come from different CDNs or different servers at a particular CDN, so may have different paths and different bottlenecks."

This is not news, since it was the same type of answer that was given back in November. It’s true, however, that Limelight and Level 3 ISPs are probably mostly to blame, and that different boxes (like the Xbox 360) encode content at higher bit rates that others, causing wild differences in customer satisfaction.

But perhaps the most useful note on the weekend post is the promise from Netflix that most of these problems will end by the end of the year with the full implementation of the upcoming Silverlight 3 player (still in beta). According to CNET,   Silverlight will allow ‘stream loads’ (sounds filthy, yeah?) to be ‘shared by the graphics and main processors, whereas the current version puts all the strain on the CPU.’ This will also allow people to see a huge increase in quality streams in lower-powered machines, like netbooks.

Netflix is saying that once the Silverlight player is ready to go, they’ll push it out to its device partners, including the Roku, Xbox, and recent Blu-ray players.

In other Netflix news, a recent customer service survey put out by the online rental service is causing some to believe that it will soon offer streaming services for both the Wii and PS3 gaming systems.

The inquiry asks current users whether they would be willing to pay for a $10 streaming disc that would enable the feature. As a reader smartly noted in the Hacking Netflix blog, for the PS3, the extra disc would likely push through a Java app running through the player’s Blu-ray Java virtual machine.