I’m not sure who you mean by “original author” here but no one has said that it would. The suggestion by Shawn Powers is that Netflix incorrectly thought that it might be the case, but that they would be wrong. Very different.

A few addenda:

The DRM is to prevent people from directly stealing the videos that they stream, not prevent unauthorized access. Same reason Hulu implements DRM.

Microsoft actually has given some limited support to the Moonlight project in the form of codec packs (in binary blob form, I believe) and possibly another area I’m forgetting. But they steadfastly refuse to share the binary capable of dealing with their DRM, likely because they do fear that people would try to crack it. (I could envision this potentially being slightly easier if given just the binary which does the DRM as a modular component…perhaps….but perhaps not.)

Regardless, both these fears are rather misplaced by the entertainment industry. If I really wanted to steal a movie or TV show…I wouldn’t be paying for Netflix. I would go to Google and type, “[TV/MOVIE NAME] torrent”, then have at it.

The DRM hasn’t made it harder for anyone to pirate anything. It hasn’t discouraged anyone. It’s just made it harder for the legitimate customers to view the content they’ve payed for in the manner of their choice.

(Don’t even get me started on Blu-Rays and DRM…if you’re a Linux user and you want to watch a Blu-Ray disc you have purchased, it is actually easier and more reliable to rip the movie, then play the resultant full quality mkv than it is to actually just play the Blu-Ray disc using any open source player. Smart move, content distributors!)

To stream from Netflix, regardless of platform, you must provide valid login credentials to the Netflix servers. You have to pay for the service (or steal someone’s password.) This is the same with Amazon Instant Video, which works on LInux because it uses Flash rather than Silverlight. Is there an AmazonVideoForFree app? No.

The issue is DRM. DRM means encrypting the video stream so that only authorized users and/or devices (i.e. iPod) can decrypt and view the content, and the content provider gets to decide if you’re authorized (licensed) to do this. But unless there’s a hardware layer involved that prevents the software layer from intercepting the decrypted video stream before it reaches your screen, there’s nothing stopping a clever person from capturing that decrypted stream to his computer and giving it to all his friends. You don’t need Linux for this, you can do this on Windows or any other platform. (Note that Blu-ray requires such a hardware layer, but clever persons have found a way of obtaining the “super-secret” keys to bypass this on virtually any Blu-ray disc.)

Amazon also uses DRM (for their videos but not music), they just do it with Flash instead of Silverlight. Microsoft has so far chosen not to make Silverlight DRM available on Linux. Microsoft is to blame for this choice, and Netflix is to blame for choosing Silverlight and Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM mechanism for their streaming service, thereby excluding Linux without Microsoft’s participation. But ultimately both are at the mercy of the MPAA and RIAA, who continue to cling to an outdated business model and fear change. They know DRM doesn’t really work, but they’re too entrenched to admit they were wrong.

And Linux, well… Linux is free in both senses of the word, and that word scares the content industry to death.

I have a netflix account which I must sign in to access netflix. This would not be different on linux, and if this were hackable; then they would be doing it already on windows (believe me the hackers ALL use windows as well, it’s the primary target). Further, any linux user with an ounce of skill can run windows in a virtual machine and use it that way.

There’s even an opensource implementation of silverlight called moonlight (http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight) but it lacks DRM support as Microsoft would have to help with that directly. lol… “Steal the netflix bits and bytes” app… clearly you know little of the subject. Anybody who want’s to steal that can easily do so, no need for a clever app.

Macs. It’s a plural so no apostrophe.