Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Watching Netflix on a Big Screen? You’re Probably on a PS3.

Netflix has some 30 million people watching its streaming video service. One of the reasons the company has been able to get those numbers is that you can watch Netflix on just about every gadget imaginable.

But it turns out that people who want to watch Netflix on their TV end up using one device more than any other: Sony’s PS3.

Netflix announced today that the gaming console is its “largest TV-connected platform in terms of Netflix viewing.” And, via a press release, CEO Reed Hastings says that “this year, at times,” the PS3 was delivering more hours of video to subscribers than regular computers, “to become our No. 1 platform overall.”

Not earth-shaking news, but still interesting — particularly because Sony rival Microsoft has been much more vocal about its plans to use its Xbox 360 game machine as a home-video hub. And earlier this year, video ad company FreeWheel claimed that the Xbox 360 was getting more video traffic than any other single gadget, including Apple’s iOS devices and Google’s Android phones.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik