The biggest impediment to a Netflix competitor is getting the licensing from the media companies. After that, Netflix is a very bandwidth-intensive service and

The biggest impediment to a Netflix competitor is getting the licensing from the media companies. After that, Netflix is a very bandwidth-intensive service and it would require a significant upfront investment to establish a competitor, which is probably why not many are trying. Even if you just want to do rental only, that still takes a significant investment to provide processing centers and make the required arrangements with the Postal Service. It's definitely not a low overhead venture. There are some people that seem to be posturing to compete with Netflix. Amazon has some video on demand services and an unlimited solution on some titles for Prime subscribers. YouTube has made forays into the rental business and if they were interested in providing a service analogous to Netflix they'd be able to do so, and this may be beneficial to Google if they decide they want to ramp up on Google TV. Furthermore, Microsoft refuses to license its DRM, which is used to encrypt Netflix streams, for use on desktop-grade Linux systems so Netflix can't do anything with the desktop Linux market for the time being. This is a major detraction for custom HTPC builders and some others. YouTube and Amazon both use Flash to deliver their content and both are playable on desktop-grade Linux machines.