Former Director of Application Development at NPR and current Director of Engineering for the Netflix API Daniel Jacobson gave a presentation at this years OSCON,  entitled ‘Redesigning the Netflix API’ and the slides have been posted here, for anyone who is interested in learning more about their API efforts.
Adrian Cockcroft also gave a talk at this years OSCON entitled ‘Data Flow at Netflix’.  The video for that presentation can be found here on the OSCON Youtube channel.
The question is whether they will make use of more open standards in the new API, i.e. not rely on Silverlight for streaming which is unavailable on Linux.