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AWS outage brings Netflix down for some devices on Christmas Eve (update: back up!)
Has an evening with National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation become an annual holiday tradition? Or perhaps you enjoy a pre-present thrill, courtesy of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Whatever the flick, there's a good chance you won't be watching it on Netflix Instant Streaming tonight, reportedly due to an outage over at Amazon Web Services. Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockroft is on the case, explaining on Twitter that the interruption will affect only certain devices -- while we're not quite sure which gadgets are currently down, we have received reports that gaming consoles and connected TVs have gone offline. Netflix, for its part, has also taken to Twitter to apologize for the outage, suggesting that you follow the as-yet-silent @Netflixhelps account for updates. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Update: As of 11:45AM ET on 12/25, nearly 20 hours after Netflix began tweeting about a service interruption, the company has confirmed that streaming has been restored.
Netflix: 'we're going to continue our international expansion next year'
Three months after Netflix invaded Canada with a bizarre combination of paid actors and $8 instant streaming plans, CEO Reed Hastings the company has declared the move a success and says it will expand its service to other countries in 2011. "Based on the early success of Netflix.ca we're going to continue our international expansion next year and we're going to allocate significant dollars to it," spokesman Steve Swasey told The Canadian Press, without specifying which territories or how many might be blanketed with Albanian soldiers next. However, Canadians and others hoping to get an experience completely on par with the original US service shouldn't hold their breath, as Swasey says there are no plans to establish a movie queue for the streaming-only service, calling it a "strategic decision." Update: The above quotes were attributed to Netflix's Steve Swasey, not CEO Reed Hastings. Our bad.
Poll: Wii Netflix discs now arriving, was it worth the wait?
It looks like today's the day that the first Wii Netflix discs are arriving in customer's hands, which only means one thing -- time for a poll. The Wii may be the last of the big three consoles to get its instant streaming fix, but it also has the largest installed base, and plenty of eager Netflix subscribers looking for an easy way to get instant streaming in their living room. Still haven't received your disc? Then you can get a taste of what's in store in the video after the break -- and if you have received it, be sure to let us know how it's working out in the poll below. [Thanks, Erik]%Poll-43449%
Netflix earnings, subscribers and streaming growth have analysts drooling over a theoretical Amazon buy
It's total pie-in-sky speculation, completely lacking in serious evidence or even vague "sources familiar with the matter," but for some reason, after two and a half years of hard rumoring, analysts seem more sure than ever that Amazon is looking into a Netflix acquisition. Netflix just announced some pretty attractive quarterly earnings, along with some nice hard numbers: it added one million subscribers in Q4 to notch itself past the 12 million mark, and 48% of its customers streamed at least 15 minutes of video off of Instant Watch -- compared to 28% a year ago. The logic goes that Amazon's looking to position itself as a digital goods purveyor, and Netflix is doing a bang up job of that very thing. Sounds just fine to us, but if Amazon tries to lock us into E Ink Netflix streaming on the Kindle, some heads are going to roll. There's naturally no comment from Netflix or Amazon on the speculation. [Thanks, Steve H.]
