Amazon Video vs. Netflix | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Video vs. Netflix

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

11 pointsJun813 comments

NYT has an article about a study conducted by the The Catalyst Group on which service users prefer on a Roku box: the all-you-can-eat approach of Netflix or the $2-$3-a-pop one from Amazon. One key finding: Both of the TV interfaces are clunky.

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I use both, but predominantly Netflix, because it works from the XBOX. I don't like having to boot up a PC, and move cables around just to watch something. Irritatingly, the only way to stream to XBOX from Unbox is to also have a PC running Windows Media Center...which is a special breed of stupid.

Netflix also has the benefit of providing access (via mail) to those movies and TV shows, of which there are still a surprising number, that are not yet available online from any provider.

"“The parties were unanimous in their wish that more of the experience be away from the computer,” Mr. Gould said. “People are expecting and really preferring a simpler, more straightforward experience that doesn’t involve the PC,” he said."

This is great news for my next project ;)

Interesting market to be in, but very tough for a startup I think. Xbox 360 already has Netflix streaming support. TV companies are offering more sophisticated set-top boxes all the time. Amazon / Netflix could easily release their own set-top box.

Are you planning something which you think will be really disruptive?

Whatever it is, it must be better than this:

http://www.roku.com/

The Roku setup/viewing experience shocks me by how good it is. $99 for this device is a steal.

Also note the XBox 360 support recently added the ability to select movies from the XBox interface. I haven't played with it enough to know if everything is available that way, but as it ties into my recommendations it offers a very good slice (and I don't have a ton of ratings I've made).

Unless you absolutely know that you have no further interest than the streaming the Roku could do, it's hard to recommend a $100 limited purpose box when you could get an XBox 360 for twice the initial investment and a yearly fee. We paid the difference by dropping cable; two to three months can make that up and it's "profit" (sort of) after that.

My product is disruptive and goes beyond Netflix/Amazon streaming. It's most easily described as a web based evolution of XBMC. The goal is to make it dead simple to pull in and organize online video as well as locally stored video. As a user you shouldn't have to know what online site streams the show you want, or check different services to see who has the movie you want to see. It should all be presented in one easy to navigate interface.

My goal is to develop an online site along with a consumer device that integrate together. The best way to do this would be through a licensing deal with set-top box makers. Take the Netflix strategy of putting the service on every available device instead of solely focusing on selling a box a la Tivo.

You mean an aggregator? That's an idea which can support at least two big players in any segment (Reddit/Digg, Yahoo News/Google News). Good luck.

I have tried both of their interfaces on TiVo and they both suck. It takes about 10-20 seconds for TiVo to switch to NetFlix or Amazon list view. Navigating the lists and entering text is agony, even with TiVo's nice remote.

Navigating any of the Tivo on-demand menus seems painfully slow for me. Is this common?

I typically just give up. I really don't want to spend five minutes to see if maybe there's something I might like.

Seems like an iPhone/Android app could turn a smartphone into an effective remote for setting up the queues. It's not a holistic solution, but seems like it could be built relatively quickly.

There are already quite a few iPhone apps that do this for Netflix

Personally, I use Flixster, but there are indeed many apps that can interact with Netflix. Apparently Netflix also publishes an API to do precisely this, so the apps (hopefully) aren't doing any funky web-scraping in the background.

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