M+E Daily
Netflix to Drop Disc Support for Third-Party Apps
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Pressing ahead with plans to allocate more resources to its streaming services, Netflix announced late last week that it would begin to phase out support for third-party apps that let subscribers sort their disc rental queues from mobile devices.
The company’s application programming interface (API) “will be focused exclusively on offering content and functionality from the streaming catalog” by mid-October, according to a June 17 post on the Netflix developer blog.
Netflix’s own mobile apps only allow subscribers to modify their “instant” streaming queues. Subscribers who want to manage DVD or Blu-ray rentals from a mobile device have had to either install a third-party app, or deal with accessing the Netflix website from a mobile browser.
Disc queue management features have helped third-party apps grow in popularity. For example, the Queue Manager app for Android devices had garnered nearly 50,000 downloads by December 2010, according to its developer; the app now claims more than 100,000 installs on Google’s Android Market.
But for Netflix, continuing to support such features would cramp the company’s plans to expand its streaming services, both in the U.S. and Canada as well as new markets abroad.
Daniel Jacobson, Netflix’s director of engineering, stated that the change “clears the path for us to add new features to the API to support international catalogs and languages.”
Some nevertheless urged Netflix to reconsider its decision. “I wrote an app specifically to manage my DVD queue,” griped one developer in response to the announcement.
