[smaudet]

Netflix over-complicates EVERYTHING. And not just because they are big business with a lot of crap to take care of. They do so because they want to have great up-time and slick services across as many devices as possible. Not just one browser and one run-time, like, every android device, every mobile device, every internet-connected game console.

And if you know anything about the way Netflix architects their dev process, you know about the Chaos Monkeys.

So I think, they just decided it was too much work to maintain, on top of everything else, with little feedback. And probably someone was abusing it as well, which equates to more work/maintenance.

Their Dos/Don'ts page shows they were pretty strict about usage of this 'open' api:

http://developer.netflix.com/

So I can totally imagine them thinking this was just too much work to maintain. Its a bit sad, yeah, but, there's not really much value it provided anyone in the first place, there's only so many things you can do with lists of movies owned by Netflix.