I have netflix and have never seen the old version, this blog post is from october 2008, this seems like old news.
Also, the player works pretty nicely, I don't have any problems.
The article forgot to mention that viewstate is enabled, which adds some bloat to the page. Most of the time it's good to disable viewstate unless you really need it.
other than the obvious error of i=1 on there, there's also a syntax error, missing the closing parentheses in the document.write call.
again, this is slashdot and you cant get away with errors like this.