The lawsuit was filed last Thursday in U.S District Court of Massachusetts. The NAD feels that Netflix has violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by not providing captions for most of its “watch instantly” move and television content.

There are over 36 million Americans alone who are deaf or hard of hearing. According to the National Association of the Deaf, many of these people have already brought this issue to the attention of Netflix by sending letters, writing blogs and signing petitions that urge the site to provide equal access to its streaming content. The group says that Netflix, despite all of the complaints and requests by NAD members, has so far only set up captions on a small number of the overall titles on its “watch instantly” service.
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires that “places of entertainment” provide “full and equal enjoyment” for people with disabilities, says NAD. They are asking the court to declare Netflix in violation of the Act and are hoping the court orders the company to provide captions on all streaming content. NAD President Bobbie Beth Scoggins made this statement:

“We have tried for years to persuade Netflix to do the right thing and provide equal access to all content across all platforms. They chose not to serve our community on an equal basis; we must have equal access to the biggest provider of streamed entertainment. As Netflix itself acknowledges, streamed video is the future and we must not be left out.”

There is some question as to whether or not Netflix has truly been ignoring this community’s need and it should be interesting to see what comes to light during this case. In a blog post back in February (long before the lawsuit), Neil Hunt, the company’s chief product officer, said that about 30% of the streaming content available at Netflix had subtitles available and that he expected to see an increase of up to 80% by the end of this year. Much earlier, in a blog post from 2009, Hunt had suggested that there were technical difficulties challenging their progress with subtitles.

The NAD lawsuit contends that the process of captioning is both technically possible and relatively simple to achieve.
It remains to be seen how the courts will rule on this case. Netflix is not a traditional “place” such as a video store you can walk into or a theater. So does it constitute a place of entertainment under the law? Netflix is an online business and one has to wonder if the courts will rule that it comes under the jurisdiction of the ADA or not. Either way, one certainly hopes they endeavor to make all of their products easily accessible to the NAD community.

The report shows that Netflix accounts for 29.7% of traffic in the US at peak times, and 22% throughout the whole day. Torrenting topped out at 21%, and this time the number is even down from what it was last fall. The report shows Netflix and streaming of audio and video in general to have increased 445 within the last year or so. People are starting to consume their media online instead of watching it on TV.

Hollywood should approve of this. These numbers mean that people are beginning to stream their videos instead of torrenting. Because, of course, we all know that the only reason for bit torrent’s existence is piracy, right? Well, not quite, but that’s what Holly wood as a whole seems to believe. The fact that Netflix is getting bigger and torrenting has taken even a slight downturn should be thrilling.

The numbers show a trend toward more online streaming. This gives ISPs an idea of what they have to look forward to in the future. People are going to want more and more bandwidth as the way they consume entertainment changes.
The problem with this whole thing is that ISPs, mostly due to the few people who do torrent on a regular basis, have begun putting in caps. In the states, even the major ISPS who arguably have lots of bandwidth to spare are debating putting in caps anywhere from 150-250 GB.

Even in Canada, where Netflix has been hugely successful since it arrived in September, some of the major DSL ISPs are debating bandwidth caps of 25 GB. If you’re streaming video, you could go through that in a day. Netflix has already had to lower the quality of its streaming in Canada to deal with the bandwidth caps. Canadian ISPs say that the current infrastructure just isn’t meant to handle the amount of internet traffic people are asking for, and that problem is only going to get worse.

Netflix is becoming a major source of internet traffic in the US and in Canada, at least. The big movie companies are thrilled with this, because it means that their seven year battle to get movies off of the torrent sites might actually be showing results. But, partially as a reaction to that battle, ISPs are now putting in caps to control how much bandwidth one user can get. I’m thinking this isn’t quite the outcome the Hollywood companies expected …

What are your thoughts? Do you have bandwidth caps in place that make it difficult to do everything online that you would like? Do you watch a lot of online media? How much bandwidth do you think you use every month? What do you think would be a good solution for Netflix and the ISPs?

It is not hard to secure your Wi-Fi connection. It takes changing a setting in the router and entering a password. Many, though, are not even aware that their connection is open, never mind that there are ways to secure it.

Cyber-attack and identity theft are only the most obvious dangers of having an open Wi-Fi connection. But there is another serious danger. If your connection is open and available to be stolen, the chances are good that someone is stealing it. The least malignant implication of this is that your neighbors will be watching Netflix on your connection, slowing you down and bringing a bandwidth cap that much closer.

But the real danger to you comes when your neighbors aren’t just watching Netflix. What if they’re doing something less reputable? What if they’re pirating music or engaging in illegal activities?

The RIAA and other organizations have been pushing courts to try people based on their IP addresses. There have been over 100000 law suits in the United States alone in the last year whose purpose was to obtain personal information on subscribers from ISPs in order to force the person to come to a settlement that ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars. If your IP address has been tracked downloading music, etc, then you are obviously guilty, right? Well, not exactly. If your Wi-Fi connection is open, then anyone accessing the internet through it will have your IP address. Your neighbor could be the one who was tracked, or even someone driving down the street sniffing for open connections.

For this reason, people have been trying to get the justice system to understand for some time that an IP is not a valid way to determine whether or not a person has been engaging in piracy.

Finally, one judge seems to understand. Judge Herold Baker refused to allow a Canadian adult film site to subpoena ISPs for the personal information of subscribers. He said that an IP address does not equal a person. The fact that this case involves porn means that the judge felt he needed to handle it delicately. A wrongful conviction in a case like this could be even more damaging to a person than it otherwise would be.

Baker then went on to cite a recent mistaken child porn raid, where an IP address was turned into a name–but the named person hadn’t committed the crime. “The list of IP addresses attached to VPR’s complaint suggests, in at least some instances, a similar disconnect between IP subscriber and copyright infringer… The infringer might be the subscriber, someone in the subscriber’s household, a visitor with her laptop, a neighbor, or someone parked on the street at any given moment.”

This case is not a precedent setting case for the United States as a whole, per se. Still, it will be interesting to see if others follow Judge Baker’s reasoning. It’s refreshing to see that a judge seems to understand something about technology. It’s nice to see that the court isn’t totally ruled by the big corporations. I’m not in support of piracy, don’t get me wrong. But I am in support of decisions based on logic and proper information. Hopefully, the trend will spread…

What do you think of the judge’s decision? Do you support it? Do you think other judges will follow suit?

There are no lack of websites to do this, in fact Netflix currently has one of the best recommendation engines, but unfortunately is only available for people in the US.

A couple of other notables come up, including Movielens, Flixter and Criticker. However by far the best service I’ve discovered is Jinni, a new movie recommendation engine in public beta.

I really won’t go into too much detail about the site, I suggest you go sign up yourself, but I will say this; Jinni provides the most useful recommendation service I’ve ever used and is also unique in inclusion of the long tail into the system. Many services notoriously suffer from simply sending people to the same popular movies which in turn makes them more popular and more likely to be recommended. On Jinni you’ll get the popular, the obscure and the unlikely.

The engine is based around the Movie Genome, a similar idea to the Music Genome Project used by Pandora.

“Jinni’s social search-and-recommendation engine uses our Movie Genome, a big, ongoing project with the Jinni community to describe video more complexly. Using proprietary technology, a Jinni search takes you inside plot elements, atmosphere, and more – for search that reflects how we think and talk about movies”

Because Jinni is using a much richer set of data than the recommendation system at Netflix, it can consequently create much better results and even solve the problems Netflix has with predicting indie if people will like certain indie movies like Napoleon Dynamite.

Also, if you are a big Netflix user – Jinni integrates well with the service including the importing of Netflix data and ratings and the ability to add a movie from Jinni to your Netflix account.

Thankfully though it is fairly easy to authorize additional computers so that the Netflix Watch Now option is also available on them. The check if a computer may use the Watch Now option is done in the Windows Registry. The Tech Recipe website found a simply way to copy the key of an authorized computer and import it to another computer to authorize that computer as well.

A user who wants to do that needs to start the Windows Registry on a computer that has the Watch Now option enabled. This is done by using the Windows R keyboard shortcut, entering regedit and hitting enter. Now navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Netflix\ Movie Viewer\ and left-click the Movie Viewer key.

Now access the export option under File > Export and save that key to the computer. Now copy that key to another computer running the same operating system. Open the Registry again and import the key using the File > Import menu. The key is specific to the operating system of the computer which means that you cannot import an XP key into Vista and vice versa.

The movies require a Windows operating system, Internet Explorer 6 or higher and Windows Media Player 11. An experienced user would have already guessed it that there is some sort of DRM involved in this setup and indeed it is. There is no obvious way to download the movies or watch them in your favorite movie player.

All you need to change this is the drm stripper fairuse4wm and a text editor according to DIzzIE from the rorta forum.

Step by Step guide:

• Go to Netflix.com/watchnow and choose a movie to watch
• Click on play, if netflix wants to install the Netflix Movie Installer do that
• WMP should tell you that you do not have the rights to view that movie, hit NO
• Open the source of the website
• Search for ‘WNPlaylistMovies’ in that file, the result should begin with ar WNPlaylistMovies =
• There should be several entries each with a different bandwidth, select one.
• Copy the url that starts with ehub and paste it in a blank new text file, e.g. (http://index.ehub.netflix.com/item/?x=sdjkdsjH)
• Create a html link from it, use this template:
[block]1[/block]
and save it as movie.html
• Now open the html file in your browser and right-click the link and save it. This will download the movie which is usually between 1-2 Gigabytes. It is however still DRM infested.
• Double-click the downloaded file and click Yes when it asks to connect to the website to acquire the license
• Launch FairUse4WM after you clicked Yes and wait until you see that the Play button becomes active in WMP. Click on Recover Keys. It should find some, hit ok and answer the next question with Yes.
• Timing is crucial here. You do get an FairUse4WM error sometimes, just try again then.
• If everything went fine FairUse4WM rips the DRM out of the file and saves a new copy without DRM which you can watch in any video player that you want.