@agiletortoise As a person who works on a pretty popular non-standard streaming app for AppleTV, I can confidently say there are dozens of reasons to not support Apple's native video player. Top of the list:

- Ads. Streaming services live and die by ads (like it or not), and the built-in player has very rudimentary ad-insertion options, and no options for interactive ads, pause-screen ads, or overlay banner ads (i know, they all suck - but they pay the bills)
- playback enhancements like custom scrubber thumbnails and chapter marks
- personalized "next episode” and autoplay logic
- enhanced closed caption rendering (fonts, styling, placement- CEA 708 is fine, but an old standard)
- proprietary accessibility audio description triggers
- Non FairPlay DRM
- Dynamic forensic watermarking
- Device concurrency limits (i.e. "only 2 screens on Netflix”)
- Playback telemetry
- Custom dynamic bit rate logic (ours is frankly better than Apple’s, and I bet Netflix's is even more tuned)
- Cross platform consistency (we have the exact same video player on iOS, Android, Web, AppleTV, GoogleTV, and most smart tvs)
- Branding - AppleTV already has people skip the app mostly from the “Next Up" row in the TV App or home screen. The player is the branding these days.
- Eliminates dependency on Apple, and waiting for the yearly update cycle to add any new features (if any) to the player.

@jimmylittle @agiletortoise Why would any user care about this:

- Cross platform consistency (we have the exact same video player on iOS, Android, Web, AppleTV, GoogleTV, and most smart tvs)

From a user's perspective, the only consistency that matters is on the device itself. It's no different from wanting idiomatic Mac apps, not apps that work exactly the same as they do on Windows and Linux.

@gruber @jimmylittle In this specific case, I would argue that, for the vast majority of users, Apple is not the platform here – Netflix is. Most of those users would rather the consistency be that Netflix works the same on all their devices, not that the video player works the same across services.

Even the Apple TV owners, who likely also have a second TV in bedroom or something that does not also have an Apple TV connected.