Thoughts about the Netflix set top box
The coverage of the new Netflix set top box was all over techmeme this morning.
I’m not surprised that Roku built this product for Netflix. Anthony Wood who was the founder of ReplayTV is the founder of Roku. And he’s the head of the digital buisness at Netflix. And more importantly, startups can often outgun large companies (ie where is the L.G set top box that was supposed to work with Netflix?)
I give Roku and Netflix a lot of credit. They are trying to move the industry forward.
My immediate reaction to this announcement was negative though. Yes, I want a lot of competition in this space. Lord knows that Apple could use some. But I don’t think that we need more proprietary hardware that is tied to a proprietary service.
As I said last week:
Someone is going to create the social firefoxTV-like OS for the UGC generation. And it will work on existing hardware. And it will be open.
Man, I can’t wait.
We need something open. Something that developers can build on top of. Something that works with web services of all shapes and sizes. Something that I can share. Something that I can comment on and share my tastes.
We don’t need yet another box that gives me access to movies.
(Jeremy Toeman has a write up as well)
I agree. If there was an open source box set that you could buy and set up the way you wanted, say with external hard for DVR and plug and play add ons (think mac dashboard like widgets) it would be huge. If you look at the projects that developed around hacked Apple TVs there are clearly people willing to develop these programs.
For someone like Netflix this is still a very safe bet. They invested in a small portion of Roku and let them bear the bulk of the risk. At this point it doesn’t seem that Netflix would be able to handle the additional costs and risks associtated with creating something like this. That said if this takes off I wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix bought the rights, rebranded it as a Netflix box and bundeled it into a new rental plan. To me that seems to be the logical step for them.
I haven’t ordered one yet so we’ll wait and see.