First off, sweet firmware upgrade yesterday, WD. Metadata from shares and Spotify fixes: boo ya! Oh, and Vimeo. Back to the point: did anyone else notice the small change made to the Netflix interface at the beginning of the week? “More episodes” was expanded to three columns so that you can easily switch between seasons of a show. Previously they were all listed in a single column and it was awful. Perhaps more interesting (to me) is the fact that it didn’t require any updating to the device, meaning the Netflix interface itself is a hosted solution. I confirmed this by firing up my old WDTV Live Plus, which has been in a box for months, and it has the same new interface. Maybe that also explains the lag that seems excessively present in the Netflix “app” when the rest of the device tends to be pretty smooth. I wonder what it looks like on Boxee and Roku? In any case it was cool to see and a big enhancement to usability.
Yeah, the NetFlix interface was transitioned to an HTML5 based interface some time ago.
Version 2.05.08 → Hub
Version 1.04.31_B → Live Plus
That first change did require a WD firmware update, but all the User Interface changes since then have been done at NetFlix’s end without WD’s involvement.
I knew it was HTML5 but I didn’t realize that meant they were going to provide it as a service as well. Cool stuff.
