The Meta Quest 3 Netflix app has been officially deprecated – if you try and use it to stream content to your Quest VR headset it’ll no longer work, and you’ll get a playback error instead. But the new browser-based experience that replaces it is leaps and bounds ahead of what we had before, so you won’t miss the old streaming method.
The Netflix app was one of the few streaming apps you could download on Quest, but it was flawed (to put it politely). There was no passthrough support to watch in mixed reality, and streams were capped at 480p (standard definition, or SD).
While the app had its supporters they were few and far between, and the Netflix app was deemed by many, us included, as a waste of digital library space. So it came as no surprise that Netflix would come up with a different strategy for supporting the Quest 3 – ditching the app completely and instead bringing its streaming service to the Quest browser.
We’ve tested it out and the difference is night-and-day. Streams are now a significantly crisper 1080p (full-HD), and you can choose to watch Netflix content in mixed reality or in your virtual home environment. What’s more you can move the window around to position it for comfortability or multitasking, you can view on a curved or flat screen and resize the display as required, and you can dim or brighten the environment to make it feel more or less like you’re watching in your own private VR movie theater.
It’s turned Netflix-in-VR from a niche oddity to a genuinely great example of the tech. Now we just need other streaming platforms to follow suit.
The first step for VR streaming
It’s worth noting you can use the browser to watch content from other best streaming services – like Disney Plus – but when testing these other platforms there was a noticeable dip in quality compared to Netflix.
The darkened cinema-like experience remains (as that’s a feature of the browser itself) but the picture quality is grainier, perhaps due to the services not offering the same level of browser support as Netflix.
What’s more, while browser-based experiences are generally fine it’s not a perfect solution, even on the Netflix side of things. Primarily because you can’t download shows or films to watch offline – say, when you take your next flight. This was lacking in the original Netflix VR app too, but now it’s a feature that might be impossible to implement unless the platform creates a new dedicated app.
Apps for Disney Plus and Prime Video on the Apple Vision Pro do support downloads, so perhaps they’ll keep this functionality when they get a Quest 3 port (although who knows if that’ll happen).
Meta hasn’t made video content as much of a focus for Quest as Apple has with the Vision Pro, but if the Netflix experience proves popular we could see it invest more in that aspect of VR. We’ll just have to watch this space.
