“The hurdle has been the lack of a generic and complete platform security and content protection mechanism available for Android.”
http://goo.gl/Y8x2o

While this is still fragmentation it is not quite the same as what is now said. Android has other apps which stream from the web just fine on a broad range of phones. For example playon, jetflix.

Netflix is pretty much the only app with this issue and alomst every other app works on all phones with out these issues due to DRM.

Personally, for a consumer to have issue with Android over fragmentation is funny to me as the Iphone is much more limited as you are kept from having many functions and apps by Apple. It is mainly something for developers to worry about.

This examples is due to the OS not being able to handle the DRM not that it cannot support video streaming and is not an issue with almost any other app.

Once a movie does hit Netflix – I’ve got a less than 50% chance of it being released as a streaming download. For example here’s a quick comparison as of today:

Streaming New Releases – Trinity and Beyond (1995), Kick-Ass (2010), The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010), Curious George 2 (2009), BASEketball. (1998)

DVD New Releases – No Strings Attached (2011), The King’s Speech (2010), Black Swan (2010), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt1 (2010), The Tourist (2010).

There’s not a single one of those streaming releases I would consider anything above b-grade crap. The DVD releases are significantly better but look at the DVD release dates for those and you’ll find they have been out for 1-2 months already. My DVD queue is already 30 deep because there’s a 3 day turnaround to get a new disc (mail-receive-mail) and what tends to happen is a disc arrives and I’m not in the mood for that type of movie so it sits for a couple days.

Netflix could be a killer service – but until the studios realize that old media (like the newspapers) is dying a slow painful death, it won’t reach its potential. I don’t blame Netflix for this so much as the people who run the studios and can’t figure out how to make money on the new distribution channels that we the consumers want. Just like the music industry can’t figure out that I want to download MP3s from Amazon – I don’t want to buy a CD from Target because I don’t have a way to play it on my phone/ipad/ipod.

Your Netflix comments? Well…everyone has their opinion. We turned off our cable because of Netflix. Between new shows regularly added shortly after they come out (like Stargate Universe) and shows I never got around to watching when they were first aired (Survivors, Sherlock, 30Rock, Glee, My Name is Earl, NGS documentaries, etc) we’ve yet to run out of good stuff to watch. Do we see shows the night they come out? No – but who cares? We watch without commercials – that alone makes it worth it. And for movies we can’t get, we just get disks sent.

I get that you don’t like Netflix streaming, but to write the whole thing off is missing all the good stuff about it.