Netflix Kills Casting from Its Mobile App to Most Modern TVs

Not sure the full motivation behind this but this is very annoying for a parent with kids. Especially if you've lost your remote, or want to quickly find something and cast it to your Chromecast/Apple TV.

I'd prefer video streaming apps be required to support Casting/AirPlay.

As of Nov 10, Netflix removed the ability to cast at all for anybody on the ad-supported tier.

A hostile move, but understandable money grubbing.

This is less understandable.

I guessed this was coming after you couldn't cast to a device that was logged into a different account. Would be a nice experience to be able to cast Paw patrol from one of the kids accounts instead of cluttering the in-laws view history with kids shows.

more rent-seeking from a pantheon member of rent-seekers.

By “directs to remote” does it mean the TV remote? I feel like I’m missing something here, it’s just saying “use the smart tv’s built in app”? Directing someone to the remote seems like an overcomplicated way of indicating this?

I’m so glad we use plex, have thought of making the jump to jellyfin though. I tried to use my MacBook Air to watch their excellent Michelin Stars show, but couldn’t watch it on 2/3 of my monitors because they don’t have HDCP built in. Modern disk drives are so cheap you can just download everything in 4K HDR, paired with an OLED display it’s absolutely breathtaking how good modern media can look.

So anyway, with the Michelin show I just downloaded it off a torrent site instead, which is a hilariously easier user experience and it’s caused by the very HDCP that is supposed to prevent piracy.

I've worked in streaming. If you see a feature pulled, or announced and delayed, or announced and never shipped, 99.99999% of the time it's due to licensing. Every single permutation of any action that a user may find beneficial is covered by a different license with a different cost.

Oh. And ads. There's another can of worms if you need to serve ads.

In this case it could be that Netflix is an asshole. Or could be that they really could not figure out proper device atteibution and ad reporting to the leeches that are the content owners and ad networks.

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