TechWandering » Internet

Netflix streaming service continues to evolve

Ed — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:37:43 +0000

It seems like just yesterday that I started talking about the new “Watch it Now” streaming service from Netflix (you can read that original article here). In fact, it’s been about 5 years since that article first appeared and, like everything else in the world of technology, things in the world of Netflix streaming have changed dramatically since then. Let’s take a look at how things started, how they’ve changed, and where they may be headed.

Availability

Back in early 2007 the ability to stream Netflix videos was a bit of a novelty and was only available using Internet Explorer while sitting in front of a PC. Now, just a few short years later, that software is embedded in practically every television set, DVD or Blu-Ray player, and gaming console that you can buy, as well as in stand-alone products like the Roku. I took a quick inventory of my own living room and came up with this list of the ways that I can watch Netflix streaming on my TV right now:

Built into my Sharp TV
Sony Playstation 3
Microsoft XBox 360
Nintendo Wii
Roku video player

Not long ago I was limited to using Internet Explorer on my PC if I wanted to stream Netflix and now, 5 short years later, virtually every device hooked up to my TV (not to mention the TV itself) can do the job. That’s amazing.

And Netflix is now also available on platforms which didn’t even exist or were just in their infancy 5 years ago: smartphones, tablet PCs, and “pads” all have the ability to stream Netflix video. That’s even more amazing.

Content

Back in 2007 the Netflix streaming catalog was much smaller than it is today and mainly consisted of older-catalog movies and 20 or 30 year-old television shows. Netflix has been hard at work over those intervening years trying to shore up its service and has added newer, even if still not the newest, content.

While they’ve added content on both the television series and theatrical release sides of the service they’ve had much more success in getting the streaming rights to more recent television shows added to the lineup than they have in getting the streaming rights to newer movies. I’m sure that has to do with the fact that the big media companies simply didn’t anticipate the amount of interest that there would be in streaming videos through Netflix and, as a result, sold the streaming rights to those shows to Netflix at a price that Netflix could afford without raising the rates they were charging subscribers.

In fact, I think Netflix’s ability to get their software onto so many different devices so quickly has made the streaming portion of their business much more popular than it would have otherwise been and that fact has gotten the attention of those same media companies that originally sold the streaming rights to Netflix at a reasonable cost. Once those original streaming contracts ended the content providers decided to charge Netflix much more for the rights to their content, to the point that Netflix was backed into a corner.

Pricing

In 2011 Netflix had a difficult decision to make. If they wanted to keep the same amount of content available to their users they would have to pay the content owners much more, and if they paid the content owners much more they would be forced to raise their prices. The alternative would be to not pay those higher prices for streaming rights and watch their streaming catalog get smaller and smaller. Netflix chose the former.

In hindsight the decision was probably the correct one but they way that it was implemented was an unmitigated disaster. Instead of simply explaining the situation and slowly raising their rates to handle the added expenses Netflix decided to suddenly double their rates and tell the users that they had simply been paying too little for their streaming service all along.

As if the price increase wasn’t problematic enough they also decided to split the business into two separate entities: the streaming service would still be called Netflix and the DVD-rental service would be an independent entity named Flixster. Users could choose one or the other for the price they had been paying or they could choose both services but pay double the price they had been paying.

Needless to say those choices haven’t gone over well with users. Netflix has since abandoned the idea of splitting the service into two entities and has tried, at least a bit, to explain the reasoning for the price increase but the damage which those decisions has caused is going to be difficult, if not impossible to repair.

The Future

So what does the future hold for Netflix? Well, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that the content providers are going to try to squeeze more and more money out of Netflix for the rights to stream their services. They simply point to the number of Netflix users streaming videos and the prices that those users are willing to pay as examples that their content has been undervalued.

Netflix has said over and over again that their future is going to be more and more about streaming and less and less about physical DVD rental business so they are going to have to try to find some happy medium that satisfies the content holders, their streaming service customers, and their bottom line. Maybe they can convince the content holders that they’re being fairly compensated for their content. Maybe they can convince their customers that they need to pay more money for the same amount of content that they get now or pay the same as they do now but receive Iess content. Meanwhile, the shareholders are grumbling as Netflix loses subscribers and is spending a lot of money to get into markets in other areas of the world.

They say that the future is going to be televised. Netflix is betting that it’s also going to be streamed. I think that, for Netflix, the next 5 years are going to be even more interesting to watch than the last 5 years have been.

How to watch NetFlix "Watch it Now" videos in your Windows Media Center with vmcNetFlix

Ed — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:23:49 +0000

In a previous article I talked about the “Watch it Now” feature available to NetFlix customers (you can find that post here). That feature allows users to stream some of the massive NetFlix catalog over the internet so that they can watch the content on their PCs without having to wait for the DVD to arrive in their mailboxes.

One of the main problems with using Watch it Now is that you are required to watch the video content using a special Internet Explorer plugin, and that means that you can only watch that content on a PC instead of on the TV in your living room. The solution to that problem was to use PC or a laptop which was hooked up directly to your TV. Now there’s a better solution, and its name is vmcNetFlix.

What is it?

vmcNetFlix is a 3rd-party add-in for the version of Media Center which ships as part of Windows Vista Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate. This add-in integrates the Watch it Now feature directly into Media Center so that you can watch a video stream from NetFlix as easily as you can view pictures or watch other recorded video. Even better, the Watch it Now video can be viewed on any Media Center Extenders you may have hooked up to the TV in the living, room, including the XBox 360.

Installing it

In order to use vmcNetFlix you’ll first have to be able to use the “real” Watch it Now feature from NetFlix. vmcNetFlix doesn’t try to circumvent or duplicate any of the technology that’s used in the plugin supplied by NetFlix — instead, it just uses that plugin from inside of Media Center instead of from within Internet Explorer. That means that you won’t be able to use vmcNetFlix unless you’ve already installed the Watch it Now IE plugin from the NetFlix website and you know that it’s working properly on the same system which is running your Media Center application.

Once you know that your installation of the NetFlix plugin is working properly you can install the vmcNetFlix application. The application is designed to work with the version of Media Center which comes with the Premium or Ultimate versions of Windows Vista so if you’re using the XP-era Media Center you won’t be able to take advantage of this add-in.

Using it

After you run the vmcNetFlix installer you’ll have a new choice available to you when you start up Media Center (look under Online Media -> Program Library). When you pick the vmcNetFlix application for the first time you’ll be prompted for your NetFlix username and password. vmcNetFlix uses this information to log into the NetFlix website and pull down data about the catalog of videos available for streaming, including their cover art, genre, and descriptions.

The application makes extensive use of the cover art to help make your content quite easy to find. You can choose from the list of content which you’ve added to your “Instant” queue on the NetFlix website, browse the complete list of available streaming content by genre (Drama, Comedy, TV Shows, etc.), or check out the “Top 50″ list to see what other people are watching. Once you find the content you’d like to watch just hit “Play” and you’ll be on your way.

Watch it Later

One additional feature of vmcNetFlix which the original Watch it Now plugin doesn’t have is the ability to save the video stream onto your hard drive so that you can play it back at a later time. While there may be no benefit to doing that If you’re at home and have a working internet connection, it may be a handy feature to those of you who are looking to download content so that you can watch it without being tethered to the internet (like on a laptop while traveling, for instance).

Other Features

While the main goal of vmcNetFlix is to allow you to stream Watch it Now content from within Media Center, the application handles much more than just streaming video. You can also perform other NetFlix tasks like adding movies to your DVD queue, viewing your rental history, or even seeing what new videos NetFlix recommends for you. The list of vmcNetFlix features is complete enough that you may never have to go to the NetFlix website again!

Conclusion

If you’re a NetFlix member and you own a computer running Windows Vista Premium or Vista Ultimate you should check out vmcNetFlix. It provides an easy way to handle most, if not all, of your NetFlix tasks, and also allows you to seamlessly integrate your NetFlix streaming content right into your Media Center. And if you also happen to have some type of Media Center Extender (remember, the XBox 360 counts here) hooked up to your TV this might be just what you’re looking for – a way to watch NetFlix videos on your TV instead of on your PC.

So that’s vmcNetFlix — it’s fast, it’s free, it works well, and it may even allow you to watch NetFlix content right in your living room. Check it out.

Log into OpenID sites using your own URL

Ed — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:42:50 +0000

In a previous post I talked about the benefits of OpenID-enabled web sites. In a nutshell, OpenID promises to let you use the same logon credentials across multiple sites rather than having to create a new username and password at each site you visit. If you manage your own web site (or even a page on a web site) you can use your site’s URL instead of your OpenID provider’s URL. That means that you can log to OpenID-enabled sites using a “friendly” OpenID name (something like “techwandering.com”) instead of your OpenID provider’s name (like “techwandering.myopenid.com”). Here’s how.

An OpenID Refresher

OpenID is a distributed system which allows users to log into an OpenID-enabled web site using an OpenID URL instead of the traditional username/password combination. The idea is that a user can choose their OpenID provider and use that provider to log into any OpenID-enabled site. Think of it as a way to allow a web site to outsource its login procedure to a third party.

Using your own web page

The way we’re able to use our own web page URL instead of our OpenID provider’s URL is by adding an extra “hop” to the whole OpenID authentication process. You’ll remember from the original post about how OpenID works that the normal flow of an OpenID logon goes like this:

The user navigates to an OpenID-enabled web site (like http://wikitravel.org)
Instead of entering a normal username/password combination, the user enters his OpenID username (like techwandering.myopenid.com)
The web site parses the OpenID username and redirects the user to their OpenID provider (in this case, to http://myopenid.com)
The user logs into his account at the OpenID provider
After successfully logging in the user gets bounced back to the original web site (http://wikitravel.org)
The user is now logged in

An Example

Using the example above, let’s say that I have an OpenID account named “techwandering” at the OpenID provider myopenid.com. That would make my OpenID login “techwandering.myopenid.com”. I could go to any OpenID-enabled web site (like WikiTravel.org) and use that URL to log into the site. Although that URL works, it’s a bit “wordy”. Since I can edit pages on the TechWandering web site I can set make a change to the main page which will allow me to use the URL “techwandering.com” to log into my “techwandering.myopenid.com” OpenID account using an OpenID feature called delegate.

To do that we’ll have to add a bit of code into the HTML of the main page of TechWandering. The code goes into the section of the page, and it looks like this:

http://www.myopenid.com/server” />
http://techwandering.myopenid.com” />

Here’s the flow of our OpenID login now (the additional steps are in bold):

The user navigates to an OpenID-enabled web site (like http://wikitravel.org)
Instead of entering a normal username/password combination, the user enters his OpenID username. In this case I’ll enter the URL “techwandering.com”.
The web site parses the OpenID username and redirects the user to their OpenID provider (in this case, to http://techwandering.com)
The web site at techwandering.com does not indicate that it’s an OpenID provider. At this point the OpenID processor at WikiTravel looks for the two tags listed above. The first tag tells the WikiTravel server what OpenID server to use to process the login. The second tag tells the OpenID server what username “techwandering.com” actually translates to at that provider.
The user is redirected to the “real” OpenID provider (myopenid.com)
The user logs into his account at the OpenID provider
After successfully logging in the user gets bounced back to the original web site (http://wikitravel.org)
The user is now logged in.

Use any page

The nice thing about this approach is that I’m not limited to using the root page of my web site. Instead of using “techwandering.com” as my OpenID login I can use a subdirectory under that root — for instance, I can use “techwandering.com/frank” or “techwandering.com/ralph”, or even “techwandering.com/george/myopenidpage.html”. As long as you can edit the HTML of a page you can use that page as your OpenID username.

Change OpenID providers without changing your OpenID login

Using this OpenID redirection approach also gives me additional flexibility when it comes to choosing my OpenID provider. In our example I’ve logged into WikiTravel using the OpenID “techwandering.com”, which actually translates to the OpenID “techwandering.myopenid.com”. The WikiTravel web site knows me by my “techwandering.com” name, and any preferences I set at that site are linked to that username. Let’s say that, at some point in the future, the folks at myopenid.com decide that they’re no longer going to be OpenID providers. If I had an account at WikiTravel tied directly to my techwandering.myopenid.com account I wouldn’t be able to log into my WikiTravel account any more. But since I used techwandering.com as my OpenID name I can just create another OpenID account at another OpenID provider and change the code in the tags on my web page to point to that new provider instead of to myopenid.com. The next time I log into WikiTavel it bounces me through my new provider instead of through the old provider. From WikiTravel’s perspective I’m still logged in as techwandering.com, regardless of what my underlying OpenID provider turned out to be.

Some Examples

Remember, the values in the tags of our example tell the OpenID processor two things:

http://www.myopenid.com/server” />
http://techwandering.myopenid.com” />

The first link above tells the OpenID processor where to go to find the OpenID provider. The second link tells the processor what the full OpenID username is going to be when the user gets to that OpenID provider. Here are two examples using other OpenID providers:

using Verisign Labs (http://pip.verisignlabs.com) as an OpenID provider:

https://pip.verisignlabs.com/server” />
http://techwandering.pip.verisignlabs.com” />

using SignOn (http://signon.com) as an OpenID provider:

https://www.signon.com/openidProcessing.action” />
https://techwandering.signon.com” />

Conclusion

If you’re a user of OpenID and you own some sort of web page go ahead and try out using that page as your OpenID identifier — it makes remembering your OpenID easier and it insulates you from being bound to a specific OpenID provider. And that makes an already open system even more “open”.

Surf the web faster and safer with OpenDNS

Ed — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 15:16:26 +0000

Here’s an easy way to make your web surfing faster and safer at the same time. It doesn’t require you to install any software on your PC and it’s compatible with just about any version of any operating system. It’s called OpenDNS. Let’s see how it works.

What is DNS?

When you want to access a website you open a browser, type in the name of the website (www.techwandering.com, for instance), and you get a page back from that website. What most people don’t realize is that the name of the website (www.techwandering.com) is really just a nickname. The real name of the server which runs TechWandering is its IP address, and that looks something like this: “123.123.123.123″. Not too easy to remember, is it? That’s why the inventors of the internet came up with the idea of DNS (”Domain Name System”). Basically, a DNS translates the friendly name of a website into that site’s IP address. You can think of a DNS server as the internet’s phonebook.

What is OpenDNS?

OpenDNS is a group of DNS servers on the internet which act as a replacement for the DNS run by your internet provider. Not only does OpenDNS provide the same basic functions as the one from your ISP, it does it faster and it adds some additional features.

Increased Speed

Using OpenDNS instead of the DNS provided by your ISP will probably make websites load faster. How is it possible that OpenDNS is faster than the DNS provided by your ISP? The reasons have to do with the way OpenDNS is designed.

First of all, OpenDNS has servers positioned all over the globe. When you make a DNS request you’re sent directly to the DNS server which is nearest to your physical location. Your ISP probably has one location which it uses for DNS resolution and if that one location isn’t near you you’ll have to hop across the internet a few times to reach that server.

To make matters even worse, most ISPs don’t maintain a complete list of all internet addresses themselves. If you ask for a website name that’s not in your ISP’s “phonebook” you’ll be sent to yet another DNS server to resolve that server’s name. OpenDNS, on the other hand, maintains the complete DNS directory on its servers. Not only does OpenDNS have the complete “internet phonebook”, its servers actually cache all of the DNS entries in memory instead of on disk for additional speed.

Security

How can OpenDNS possibly provide additional security?

By now you’ve probably heard of “phishing” sites. These are website which are designed to look like legitimate sites but are really out there just to trick you into revealing some important information (for instance, your credit card number). The phishing attack typically begins when a user receives a fake e-mail from a supposed well-known source such as Bank of America. The e-mail will usually say something like “There’s been a problem with your account, please click here to log in and fix the problem”. The link in the e-mail doesn’t really point to Bank of America, though — it points to the fake website which was set up to look just like the Bank of America site. If you click on the link in the e-mail and enter your username and password you’ve just given the bad guys access to your accounts.

OpenDNS helps to protect you from those types of websites by maintaining a list of known phishing sites. If you click on a link that’s sending you to “www.badguyswebsite.com” instead of “www.bankofamerica.com” OpenDNS will alert you to the fact that “www.badguyswebsite.com” is a known phishing site. OpenDNS works with a number of different security organizations to make sure that this list of known phishing sites is complete and up-to-date.

Additional benefits for users without OpenDNS accounts

You can use OpenDNS without registering on the OpenDNS website and setting up an account for yourself. You’ll still get the benefits of increased surfing speed and security, as will as a few other features. For instance, if you mis-type the name of the website you’re trying to reach (www.craigslist.og instead of www.craigslist.org, for instance) OpenDNS will make an educated guess and try to send you to the proper site. If it can’t determine where you were trying to go it will display a Google-like page of possible destinations. That page includes some ads, and it’s by displaying those ads that OpenDNS makes its money.

Extra benefits for users with OpenDNS accounts

If you create an account for yourself on the OpenDNS site you can take advantage of even more services such as using OpenDNS to block adult sites and/or other sites which you deem as inappropriate, setting up shortcuts for sites which you visit often (”wsj” instead of wallstreetjournal.com), and maintaining your own list of blacklist and/or whitelist sites.

Setting up your OpenDNS takes a little bit of work, although the instructions on the OpenDNS website are very easy to follow. When you register an account on OpenDNS you have to supply the IP address of your local network. If you have a static IP address from your ISP you can just tell OpenDNS what that IP address is and you’ll be done. If you have a dynamic IP address you’ll have to use an additional tool to keep the OpenDNS servers notified of your current IP address. The help system at OpenDNS has a very good explanation of how to set that up.

Using OpenDNS

There are two ways to start using OpenDNS and the instructions on the OpenDNS website do a fantastic job of walking you through each of them.

The first way to implement OpenDNS is to just set up your computer’s network settings to point to the OpenDNS servers for name resolution instead of to your ISP’s DNS servers. The directions on the OpenDNS site will walk you through the steps for your particular operating system.

The second way to implement OpenDNS is for users who have multiple computers behind some sort of router. Rather than setting the DNS settings on each computer you can just set the DNS settings on the router and all of the computers behind that router will use OpenDNS for name resolution. Once that’s done all of your computers will inherit all of benefits of OpenDNS.

Conculsion

If you use the internet you should do yourself a favor and check out OpenDNS. It’s fast, it’s safe, it’s easy to set up, and it’s free. You can’t ask for much more than that.