Thursday, August 25, 2011

Distro Breakdown in the Netflix/Linux Petition

I was pretty stoked to read earlier this month that ChromeOS and Chrome/Chromium was getting a Netflix app in the Chrome Webstore.  I installed it earlier tonight, but sadly it's not working on Chrome or Chromium on Ubuntu.  I installed it on my Cr-48, and it worked there.  Reports on the page indicate that it's working on Chrome/Windows.  But Chrome/Chromium on Linux -- no dice :-(

So the Netflix-on-Linux blues continue, unfortunately :-(

In looking for workarounds, I came across this web petition for Netflix-on-Linux support:
So I signed the petition and was impressed to see 16,518 other signatures!

In fact, I downloaded all of the signatures and did a little (far from scientific) grepping of my own to see where Ubuntu stood among the other desktops in the signature list.  Ubuntu lands at nearly 70%.  Impressive!





Ubuntu 11433 69.2%
Fedora/RH/CentOS 1600 9.7%
Mint 1092 6.6%
Arch 891 5.4%
Debian 856 5.2%
SuSE 596 3.6%
Other 50 0.3%

16518


:-Dustin
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6 comments:

  1. AnonymousAugust 25, 2011 at 9:31 PM

    Did you try the beta channel for Chrome? It's apparently a nativeclient plugin, which is only enabled in the beta channel and later. It's probably safe to assume this will come to all Chromes eventually.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bryan QuigleyAugust 26, 2011 at 9:18 AM

    How did you pull down the data? I'm just curious about the number who said yes to having netflix. If we can get 10,000 people to drop netflix for just a month that's a $100,000 loss for netflix. Worth them considering.

    If everyone switches to Amazon Prime, over a year that's 1.2 Million. I think that should be able to cover their development costs :).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dustin KirklandSeptember 4, 2011 at 5:38 PM

    Bryan, pretty manually, unfortunately. I tried using wget/curl, but it looked like some cookies were required to get to the data. So it took a few dozen right-click-and-saves to get all of them. Took me maybe 10 minutes. Then grep and wc did the rest of the work ;-)

    :-Dustin

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dustin KirklandSeptember 4, 2011 at 5:39 PM

    Anonymous,

    Haven't tried the Chrome beta yet...Will give that a go! Thanks for the pointer.

    Dustin

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousSeptember 26, 2011 at 6:48 PM

    I noticed that there is an Android Netflix app. out now. How can Netflix justify dragging their feet on a full blown Linux app. is beyond me!

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousOctober 3, 2011 at 2:55 AM

    Apparently the petition worked because it would seem a native app for Linux is in the works

    http://benjaminkerensa.com/2011/07/30/netflix-instant-is-coming-to-the-entire-linux-community/

    ReplyDelete

Please do not use blog comments for support requests! Blog comments do not scale well to this effect.

Instead, please use Launchpad for Bugs and StackExchange for Questions.
* bugs.launchpad.net
* stackexchange.com

Thanks,
:-Dustin