"We've been a software company since an accomplished engineer, Reed Hastings, co-founded the company in 1997."

Note that success doesn't happen overnight. 1997 was 13 years ago.

They've been successful for a while, though :-)

In case anyone else was surprised at the failure of feed discovery in google reader: http://techblog.netflix.com/rss.xml is the feed URL.

I thoroughly enjoyed both following and participating in the Netflix challenge (even though I never really got anywhere in the competition). If this blog is in that same "advancing technology" spirit, I think it will be a success.

Nitpick: the logo/header has some really nasty jpeg artifacting.

Here's to hoping for a post on why streaming subtitles are taking so damn long to get out.

Fingers crossed that one of their first posts is: "Moving away from PlaysForSure DRM so that we can provide support to Linux desktop users". If not, I expect this blog will be flooded with comments lamenting the lack of Linux support, as most of their other blogs were the last time I looked.

I'm kind of surprised there hasn't been a stronger effort to crack PlaysForSure DRM considering the widespread appeal of Netflix. According to unofficial reports I read a while ago that I am too lazy to look back up and cite, Microsoft's main motivation for disallowing Linux desktop support is that they feel it will make it too easy to hack the protocol. And that makes it even more surprising that someone hasn't gone in and cracked it just out of spite for that position.

Are they really using PlaysForSure? I thought that died after the Zune fiasco.

Ah, it appears you're correct. They are using Microsoft's similarly-named "PlayReady" DRM, which also plays PlaysForSure content. See http://www.homemediamagazine.com/netflix/netflix-selects-new...; it seems that both PlayReady and PlaysForSure are derived from Windows Media DRM 10: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayReady.

Thanks for the correction, sorry for the error.

Oof. The JPEG logo looks awful.