Netflix spokesperson MoMo Zhou has told The Verge that this morning’s window where Netflix appeared as a “participating” service in Apple TV — including temporary support for the watchlist and “continue watching” features — was an error and has now been rolled back. That’s a shame. The jubilation in our comments on the original story was palpable.
Netflix has never gotten on board with Apple’s attempts to aggregate content from numerous streaming services, and it has also refused to participate in similar efforts from other companies like Google. So it was a surprise when it seemed like Netflix had changed its tune out of nowhere without any press release or official announcement from either side. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said he’d heard it was a bug of some sort earlier on Friday.
Unfortunately, at least for now, Netflix’s stance on all this remains the same. The company still very much wants everyone to browse and consume its content from within the Netflix app. Maybe there’s still hope for Netflix to change its mind, but that day is not today. At least we now know how easily it could be done, I suppose.
