Over the past few months, owners of select smart TVs and streaming players have been receiving warnings that their devices will no longer support Netflix as of December 1st. The brands affected include Roku, Samsung, and Vizio, but the good news is that if you bought a TV or a streaming player from any of these companies within the past few years, it’s unlikely that your particular device will be affected by the incoming Netflix purge.
“On December 2nd,” a Netflix spokesperson told Gizmodo earlier this month, “Netflix will no longer be supported on a small number of older devices due to technical limitations. We’ve notified all impacted members with more information about alternative devices we support so they can keep enjoying Netflix uninterrupted.”
At the time of our initial reports, it wasn’t entirely clear which specific devices would no longer have access to Netflix after December 1st. Thankfully, that’s been mostly cleared up by the affected device makers. A Roku spokesperson says that the following models will lose Netflix support next month:
- Roku SD (N1050)
- Roku HD-XR (N1101)
- Roku HD (N1100, 2000C)
- Roku XD (2050X, 2050N, 2100X, 2100N)
Select Vizio smart TVs with Vizio Internet Apps (V.I.A.) that were sold around 2012 to 2014 will also be affected. This was unfortunately as specific as the company would get, but if you Vizio TV is at least 5 years old, you might have to find another way to watch Netflix next month. The same goes for “select 2010 and 2011 Samsung Smart TV models that were sold in the U.S. and Canada,” but, once again, model numbers weren’t provided.
The culprit behind this mass exodus of Netflix support appears to be Windows Media DRM, as “a small percentage” of older devices are incapable of upgrading to Microsoft PlayReady. The silver lining is that there are basically infinite ways to watch Netflix, and if you don’t want to dump your old Vizio or Samsung TV, you can always get an affordable streaming player (but not the ones listed above) and watch Netflix with that.
