Posts by Thomas Hawk and Om Malik point out three job postings from Netflix: Video Encoding Engineer, Senior Embedded Software Engineer – Electronic Delivery, and Senior Embedded A/V Software Engineer – Electronic Delivery. Note that these are all for the Electronic Delivery Service department. And two of them contain this interesting tidbit:
Our team of engineers from ReplayTV, TiVo, AOL and Motorola is looking for Senior Software Engineers with experience developing Consumer Electronics products for the digital age.
Based on the technologies being sought and the job descriptions, it is clearly online content delivery to consumer electronics devices – such as TiVo, Akimbo and cable boxes. It is possible that Netflix could produce their own hardware, but I don’t think that is logical considering the number of platforms already in the field. They’d be better off making a system for TiVo, ReplayTV, Akimbo, PCs, cable boxes – even XBox 360 or PlayStation 3.