And in both situations, each company is giving its competitor coarse-grained data about its customer base (Netflix in real time, Apple with a few months' lead).
If Netflix hasn't put DRM on their stream, someone monitoring the pipe could easily get the zeitgeist of what movies are being streamed.
Um, ever tried to stream Netflix video from anything that wasn't running the latest Silverlight? Or diverting/capturing the video from the stream, even on an authorized client?
That's why there's still no Netflix client for Android or Linux, and why Netflix probably doesn't have to worry too much about content sniffing.
It's certainly a good point-- It's not like competitors that also work together is a new concept. Except I'd say this is a bit different. We're not talking about Netflix relying on Amazon to produce a hardware component, we're talking about Amazon staffing and being responsible at the lowest level (24/7) for Netflix's service to operate (I'm assuming a bit here... perhaps Netflix can still function through an AWS outage). And I'd question if that's really something you want to put in the hands of a company which wants to steal away your customers.
No worse than me streaming Netflix over my Shaw internet to replace me buying Shaw cable.
In fact Amazon are going to be more careful about dealing honestly with Netflix. If they spy on / interfere with customers on their cloud service because they might be competitors they are going to attract government intervention and lose a lot of customers.
