So its for stalkers?

Well leave it to Microsoft to innovate convenience out of a release.

Vista can only load one video driver at a time. Not only that but the way it does it is per architecture. What this means is that all video cards have to be of the same family. An ATI card as primary cant run a nVIDIA card as its secondary and vice-versa. The reason why is really no surprise. Aero. The new interfaces dependence on Direct X is what is causing it.

I learned this the hard way when I was unable to add more displays to a new system because the video card is not supported and had to buy 2 new video cards after the new one was also not working so I had to return it and go with another one that did have the correct architecture. This brings me back to video card is not supported being the worst possible error message for this situation.

There’s an old joke that applies to this:

There was this helicopter pilot whose job was to ferry VIP’s from Seattle airport to downtown. One day he found himself with a passenger in a pea soup fog somewhere over downtown Seattle. No landmarks were visible and the passenger became panicky. The pilot said “Don’t worry” and very gradually let the helicopter down until it was hovering opposite the window of a large, unidentifiable building.

The pilot motioned to a woman working in the building to roll down her window and asked her “Where are we?”
The woman responded “You are in a helicopter.”

The pilot immediately lifted the helicopter above the building tops, flew a mile and a half, let it down through the fog, and hit the landing pad dead center. The amazed and relieved passenger said “How on earth did you do that?” The pilot said: “It was simple. The information the woman gave me was precisely correct and totally useless. I knew that she had to be working at Microsoft.”

Blockbuster, if you remember, would always get exclusive deals. They had some real pull because most of a movie’s money is actually made in the rental arena and in licensing. Now that Netflix is on top they can’t talk to other companies to maybe get some flexibility on the Watch Now capabilities?

Microsoft is finally adding DRM to Silverlight sometime this summer, how long will it take for Netflix to catch up? More importantly, how much extra will they charge?

Watch Now has been free for two reasons. One, theyre trying out this whole streaming thing. Two, a large portion of their subscribed base can’t access it because they are on Macs or because they refuse to use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox while on Windows.

Once they open up Watch Now to that bigger user base I am sure they will start charging a premium for it. Just like they announced the second that Blu-Ray won the format war.

Apple is in the Blu-Ray side, well, they were before the format was over and you could pick a side. At some point soon Apple computers will start coming with built-in Blu-Ray drives. At which point, owning a Mac and having Netflix will turn out to be counterproductive. Unless you do not care about watch now, and do not care about Blu-Rays… In which case I’m sure Netflix will not charge you more.

The problem is, right now they are claiming that it is a feature. Your monthly payments are for movies by mail and movies instantly, as stated by this screenshot of their website. They can talk all they want about how its just something extra and it doesn’t factor into the price. The reality is that Netflix is using Watch Now as a feature to add new customers, while their inability, ( adobe has drm on flash) unwillingness, (they’ve stated theyre working on it) plans are to cut down on their bandwidth costs until they can charge everybody more.

For the record, I am a Netflix customer. I am very happy with the mail-in service but am annoyed that I cannot use my Mac to access these extra features I do feel I am subsidizing for Windows users. I also own a PS3 and -will not- be upgrading to Blu-Ray discs. I won’t subsidize Watch Now for others, while at the same time paying extra for the one ‘nifty’ feature I can get.