Last year as NetFlix was facing its first real threats from Wal-Mart and BLOCKBUSTER (with Amazon.com rattling a sabre in the background) for the DVD by mail business, they announced they would partner with TiVO on a service for movie downloads. This week NetFlix fans are all abuzz about an apparent leak of a beta movie downloader someone got a peek at in their NetFlix account.

Around the time of the announcement, both TiVo and NetFlix had been Wall Street high-flyers because of their cutting edge technology for home movie and television viewing, but saw their shares fall by about half over the last year in the face of increased competition. Around that same time, "TiVo won U.S. regulatory approval for technology that would permit users to send copies of digital broadcast shows over the Internet to a limited number of friends, despite concerns by the Motion Picture Association of America and the national Football League about the risks of unfettered distribution of copyrighted shows and airing regional games outside of their markets."

It seems this story broke on the Hacking NetFlix website in a post titled, "Glitch Exposes NetFlix Player". He writes that he "just noticed in [his] account info page, a section for NetFlix Player with a link to ‘Register Player’…."

Looks like I may have to update my DVD Rental comparison page in the near future…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Online DVD Rental. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. | Permalink