Greg Peters said in an blog post late Friday Netflix has had problems bringing its service to Android because of the inherent fragmentation of the platform and DRM issues in the OS.
Both iPhone and Windows Phone 7 versions were finished quickly, but Android doesn’t have the “generic and complete” copy protection needed to protect against stream ripping and keep deals with studios that wouldn’t allow it otherwise. Netflix has to develop support for devices one at a time.
“This is a much slower approach and leads to a fragmented experience on Android, in which some handsets will have access to Netflix and others won’t,” Peters wrote. “This clearly is not the preferred solution, and we regret the confusion it might create for consumers. However, we believe that providing the service for some Android device owners is better than denying it to everyone.”
The Android port is still coming but will only reach “select” devices in early 2011. Netflix has been working on trying to get a more universal copy protection implementation. No timeframe has been given when that effort may hit the Android platform, if at all.
