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

6 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. 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 :).

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  3. 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. Anonymous,

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

    Dustin

    ReplyDelete
  5. 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. 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