Zibblog

I keep saying that I’m going to do more blogging, and then stuff comes up. As usual, it’s work. The company that I left the flix to work at is now called Skyfire and the two founders will be presenting a demo at DEMO on Tuesday. If you’re interested in what it looks like, a coworker put together a youtube video showing off some of what the product can do.

Personally, I’ve been working on the browser start page along with a bunch of other related and unrelated projects. As some of you know, we are still looking for a front end web engineer to work on many cool projects related to the phone start page and the main website, so if you know me and know of a person that might be interested, drop me an email.

The other day, I saw this post on Zatz Not Funny about Netflix Instant Watching. What I found interesting is the opinion that we either need to enable everyone that asks or “call it a beta and let folks apply”. I’m not really sure what the difference is and why we need to let people apply. It got me to thinking about how beta applies to web apps that are constantly updating. At the point that you are pushing bug fixes and interface changes every 2 weeks, is it a really long beta period or a bunch of point releases?

In a totally unrelated note, the feature also got mentioned on TWIT and dl.tv. For the most part, both mentions were pretty good. The only thing that irked me was Patrick Norton saying on multiple shows that we spent $40 million developing it, but I’ve seen this stated incorrectly in other places as well. The $40 million is what we budgeted to spend on it in 2007 including infrastructure and content licensing.

For a while, one of the big projects at work has been the instant viewing feature for the Netflix website, which involves serving up high quality streaming video realtime to PCs. After having to be pretty careful about what I say about video on the computer for the past few months whenever the subject comes up in conversation, the feature is finally out in the open. There’s isn’t much to say that isn’t in the press release. I’ve been working on web applications for long enough that I’ve forgotten about how much trouble client applications are. Here’s some links to some mentions of the feature. I’ve been fairly happy with the articles so far.  I’ve also been kind of irritated here and there, but they can’t all be positive. I just can’t wait until I hear from a friend that happened to be included in the rollout, so that I can get a trusted third party opinion.  For all you Mac and Firefox people (which includes me), you’re out of luck for the moment at least since the feature requires IE and Windows.

• Hacking Netflix
• NY Times
• Variety
• Forbes
• Gizmodo
• O’Reilly Radar

Netflix’s CEO is going to be on 60 minutes tonight for anyone interested.  They shot some footage at work awhile back, but I had almost forgotten about the whole thing until an email went out a couple of days ago.