Netflix's house of cards to be fortified with HTTPS appliance Netflix will this year roll out HTTPS to keep customer's viewing habits secret. The streaming company's April earnings letter (PDF) says it will make the move because it "helps protect member privacy, particularly when the network is insecure, such as public wifi, and it helps protect members from eavesdropping by their ISP or …
Such a hit would cost Netflix potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
I can see that there would be a sizable up-front cost to this in purchasing and setting up new kit, but if the power consumption and maintenance costs on this would range in the "hundreds of millions," I would be surprised. The company makes a few billion in profits each year, if I understand the financial statements on their web site which would put the estimated impact of this in the range of 10%, give or take. Either they think this issue might have a significant impact on their profitability or they are misstating the likely impact.
The roll-out won't be a simple affair, either, as there are Netflix clients in plenty of appliances (DVD players, game systems, etc). As a customer, I appreciate where they seem to be going with this and hope that they can get this done without any serious disruptions.
I suspect that it'll still offer unencrypted for a lot of those devices.
I have a relatively aged Sony bluray player that would allow netflix in the US but wouldn't in the UK because they got paid to include lovefilm instead.
After destroying my UK profile and tricking it into thinking it was in the US I found I couldn't login with my UK-created account as it had to be a pure-us account to allow the device. Which is interesting given you can watch different territories content just by using a VPN.
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