by George Heymann
techeadlines@gmail.com
Netflix announced today on its official blog the rollout of the Netflix application for the Android Platform. The free application is available from the Android Market.
Currently, the Netflix app supports the following phones:, The HTC Incredible with Android 2.2, HTC Nexus One with Android 2.2, 2.3, HTC Evo 4G with Android 2.2, HTC G2 with Android 2.2 and the Samsung Nexus S with Android 2.3.
Netflix spokesman Roma De explained, “We expect to quickly add to the number of phones that can download from Android Market as we work with ecosystem partners to expand playback support.
“The Android platform is gaining rapid adoption in the mobile world and presents a great opportunity to reach more of our members. Because the platform has evolved so rapidly, there are some significant challenges associated with developing a streaming video application for this ecosystem. One of these challenges is the lack of standard streaming playback features that the Netflix application can use to gain broad penetration across all available Android phones.
“In the absence of standardization, we have to test each individual handset and launch only on those that can support playback. We are aggressively qualifying phones and look forward to expanding the list of phones on which the Netflix app will be supported. We anticipate that many of these technical challenges will be resolved in the coming months and that we will be able to provide a Netflix application that will work on a large majority of Android phones.”
Let’s hope that they can resolve the remaining Digital Rights Management (DRM) technical issues quickly and that the Netflix Client will be upraded to support the majority of Android devices as expected.
Source: The Netflix Blog
