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Netflix Pre-Empts Apple With Unlimited Movie Downloads

by Tim Stevens on January 15, 2008 at 01:35 PM

Netflix Pre-Empts Apple With Unlimited Movie DownloadsIn the war between Netflix and Blockbuster for online rental domination, it sure looks like Netflix has come out ahead. As Blockbuster suffers layoffs and other financial woes, Netflix traffic from subscribers is way up, far past competition. That battle isn't quite over yet, but for Netflix it's time to start a second fight on a second front: online downloads. Its latest strike is to make "Instant" downloadable movies unlimited for most subscribers.

Netflix launched the streaming service back in early 2007 as "Watch it Now," but it got a retooling and a renaming when it was hacked in August. The service lets you stream one of hundreds of films and television series collections from the Netflix site through a web browser. Right now it sadly only works through Internet Explorer on Windows, making its applicability somewhat limited. Instead of opening it up to other browsers (and Macs), Netflix chose to remove any limits on hours of viewing per month on subscribers. This move comes ahead of an anticipated announcement from Apple of movie rentals from iTunes. This, combined with competition from Amazon's downloadable service and similar offerings from Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace, means the downloadable rental space is finally heating up.

Can Netflix win both in the disc-based media realm as well as the online direct-download area? Its legion of dedicated subscribers will certainly be pulling from it, but Apple fans certainly don't lack dedication themselves.

From Consumerist

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Tags: Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, Xbox Live Marketplace, XboxLiveMarketplace

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