said by BACONATOR26:Given they launched the platform on Silverlight, I'm guessing quite a bit. But I have to hand it to Netflix, their streaming platform is the best I've seen.
Or maybe you guys are paranoid, and it doesn't make sense for Netflix to support higher bitrates on the Silverlight client?
Think about it. Netflix has three encoding profiles, mobile, STB, and PC. The PC is a small minority among platforms; more Netflix users stream on the PS3 alone than the PC, and that's not taking into account all other mobile and STB devices.
SuperHD introduced three new bitrates. That means that they have to re-encode every single piece of HD content in their library to those three new bitrates (which takes time and money) and store the resulting extra tens (hundreds?) of terabytes of data. And they store their data on S3, where 100TB of content costs $78,000 a year just to store. The amount of SuperHD content on Netflix has been rapidly increasing as they transcode content, but what would YOU prioritize to come first? The STB h.264 profile that covers the vast majority of Netflix usage, or the PC VC-1 profile that covers a much smaller portion of users?
Face it, even if Netflix wanted to do SuperHD for the PC browser client, and even if they thought the extra cost for transcoding and storing was justified, they couldn't even do it until they finished transcoding everything for the STB profile.
Somehow, prudent business practice becomes an evil agenda where they've been bought off by Microsoft...
