InternetNetflix Grinds to a Halt
The online movie rental player blames its shipping system for a failure that's frozen much of its business.
Source: Reuters Online DVD rental pioneer Netflix on Thursday worked feverishly to fix the most severe outage in its history, as disc shipments to a third of its 8.4 million customers came to a halt due to a shipping system problem. Red mailers with the Netflix name have become ubiquitous for many Americans who pick films to watch on the Internet and then get DVDs in the mail, usually a day or two later. Advertisements litter the Web with trial offers. However, Netflix shipped no DVDs on Tuesday. It shipped some on Wednesday but has shipped none so far on Thursday. Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said the Los Gatos, Calif.-based company would give credits to affected customers and was working "feverishly" to determine the cause of the outage and fix the problem. RELATED ARTICLES Movie Downloads Take on Ticket Sales in France TiVo Embraces Ads for Amazon Amazon Kindle: The iPod of Book Readers? For more stories on this topic: Swasey said the disruption was not affecting its Watch Instantly Web streaming service, which it offers free to subscribers. Netflix's stock was up 1.1 percent, or 34 cents, to $31.50 a share in afternoon trade. It had been up more than 3 percent earlier in the day but gave back most of the gain after news of the shipping problems surfaced. Cary Miller, a media executive and avid Netflix user who receives four or more discs in an average week, said he was not bothered by the disruption... [ Read more on www.internetnews.com ]
InternetThe Great Industry Standard Conspiracy
As x86 becomes the ever-pervasive server "standard," RISC and other long-standing and capable architectures are being pushed further into the cold. Natural market forces or deliberate positioning on the part of the OEMs?
InternetNBC builds online audience even as TV ratings soar (Reuters)
Reuters - For NBC Universal, balancing TV and online coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games has been as tricky as any maneuver on the balance beam, parallel bars or vault.