Netflix Expanding Streaming Service to The UK and Ireland 78
bdking writes "Netflix says it will begin offering streaming video services to customers in the United Kingdom and Ireland early next year. (No DVDs by mail, though. That's so 'Oughts.') The company launched services last month in 43 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean."
Huh? (Score:1)
They want to expand into bankrupt Ireland but still don't have any plans to open up in Australia? FFS.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I have enough trouble finding legit content (and spare time) to use up 150GB, much less 250GB. You Americans are spoilt. :)
Video games in the tens of gigabytes (Score:2)
I have enough trouble finding legit content (and spare time) to use up 150GB
That depends on how many video games you plan to buy on the next generation console that is rumored not to support optical discs. Xbox 360 games are already up to 20 GB across three discs, and PS3 games have hit 50 GB.
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I have enough trouble finding legit content (and spare time) to use up 150GB, much less 250GB. You Americans are spoilt. :)
A man can never have too many Linux ISOs, as I keep telling the wife.
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Yes well, assuming you're not using "Linux ISOs" as a metaphor for something else, my ISP hosts them locally anyway (official mirror), which makes it extremely fast to obtain them and also means they're not counted towards the quota.
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I'm not aware of any ISPs in the US that have a cap of only 150GB/month. And the ISP I have has no cap at all at present.
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Only for international traffic, IIRC (I'm not Australian). Australia's choke point is its fibre links to the rest of the world. If you host within Australia (by arrangement with the ISPs I believe), then you can get round the caps.
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well, they are. Ire and Eng are synonyms.
I have been to several places in London (never mind Ireland) whee saying that would get you a good kicking.
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I suspect that the latter issue (licensing) is going to be a problem for anyone who wants to move in because of the 800lb gorilla in the form of Telstra and specifically BigPond Movies.
They have big deals with content producers (some of which may be exclusive deals) plus you can watch the content on your TV if you have a Telstra set-top-box (T-Box) or a compatible TV (some LG and Samsung models from the look of it). Plus if you are with BigPond for internet you get the movies quota free.
The biggest problem
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They don't seem to try too hard to license "new" content anyway. Here's what Netflix for Argentina looks like: http://i.imgur.com/Sxx2B.jpg [imgur.com]
The hunt for red october? REALLY?
No wonder no one I know is subscribing. I told many of my friends about that but when netflix finally got here, it was a disappointment. I have some friends in Chile who had the same feeling.
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I use worldwide roaming (Score:1)
http://unblock-us.com/ [unblock-us.com]
I understand that there are copyright laws involved which make distribution country specific. But seriously, this is the 21st century, get your laws in order. Something designed to work in the 19th century just no longer cuts it.
Re:I use worldwide roaming (Score:5, Insightful)
Screw paying to get around geographic IP blockades.
It's torrents for breakfast, lunch and dinner, until everyone gets with the program. If they never get with the program, then it's torrents forever.
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Screw paying to get around geographic IP blockades.
It's torrents for breakfast, lunch and dinner, until everyone gets with the program. If they never get with the program, then it's torrents forever.
Amen brother.
Instead of progressing forward and using "the digital" to its full extent we're going backwards.
Take for instance books : physical books I can buy anywhere and have them shipped to my country. Try making the same thing with e-books. On amazon.uk some e-books are available only to uk customers. Really ? Who the fuck comes up with this shit ?
Torrents forever, not only for video but for books and anything else thats ip locked.
Re:I use worldwide roaming (Score:4, Insightful)
Couldn't agree more!
I live in Denmark and I don't mind paying for music, tv-series and movies. My 6.000+ CDs and 3.000+ DVDs and blu-rays should testify to that. But I absolutely refuse to wait for someone to 'buy rights' or whatever here in my country before I can watch new stuff. If I can't get it legally, I'll have to get it illegally. I have the money in my hand. I want to pay for it. But I can't. Get with the program! - Put your stuff up for sale before someone steals it and gives it away for free!
There's countless of VPN services that basically live on two stupidities:
- Geo-discrimination. If you live the wrong place, there's something you'll have to wait for (maybe forever), that others have already got.
- Suing your customers. The copyright owners spend a lot of effort tracking down 'violators' of their rights and sue them.
VPN allows you to both hide and pretend you're somewhere that you're not.
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If I can't get it legally, I'll have to get it illegally
I'd have a lot more sympathy with statements like this if you were talking about gaining access to medical textbooks rather than Transformers 5.
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"Who the fuck comes up with this shit ?"
Copyright fees collection agencies. Here, I just said it.
In short, they want huge amount of money from these services. If Netflix can't get a profit in mentioned country/region due of these fees, they won't go there.
In other news (Score:1)
Netflix lost 800,000 subscribers.
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Netflix lost 800,000 subscribers.
Were they profitable subscribers? Or subscribers who were "overusing" the system from the perspective of Netflix's expected usage patterns? I'm not suggesting these customers did anything wrong, Netflix may very well have had naive models and expectations.
I've had friends with various small businesses and they all learned rather quickly to tell some potential customers: I am sorry but I don't think we will be able to help you. You can make a profit, or you can meet everyone's needs, but you probably can'
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Netflix lost 800,000 subscribers.
Were they profitable subscribers? Or subscribers who were "overusing" the system from the perspective of Netflix's expected usage patterns? I'm not suggesting these customers did anything wrong, Netflix may very well have had naive models and expectations.
I've had friends with various small businesses and they all learned rather quickly to tell some potential customers: I am sorry but I don't think we will be able to help you. You can make a profit, or you can meet everyone's needs, but you probably can't do both.
They lost me, and I was seriously under utilizing their system. I had maybe 1 dvd out every 4 months. I streamed about 4-5 30 minutes episodes of tv a week.
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But regardless, you could easily be an anomoly. For every customer like you they lost, maybe they lost 10 customers who wee a net cost. Maybe they also gained a few customers who felt the lower price justified joining.
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that one dvd a month ended up costing me an extra $7 a month on top of the price i already paid. I primarily used the download service, and the mail service was just for those few things that were not available to stream. When they split their plans and almost doubled my price torrents because the more attractive alternative.
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In other words, sacrificing that DVD rental saves you $2 per month. That was the option that you rejected. How much would you pay for just the DVD rental?
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You make a good point. But I think my main issue is that Netflix was worth more to me when I first subscribed. As I depleted their content it slowly became worth less to me without me actively realizing it. The price change was enough of a shock to the system to make me reevaluate the worth of the entire system. Without the price change they probably could have kept me skating along paying a monthly fee for quite some time, since the price was low enough that I didn't really notice it until it was brough
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Honestly, this uproar over netflix kind of lets the cat out of the bag about how people view copyright and their entitlement to it all. We've been told all along people torrent because the legal options are too much of a burden. Here, Netflix has done something that actually makes sense. Mailing DVDs around? That is
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Netflix lost 800,000 subscribers.
..and their revenues were up 65% for the quarter.
There was no need to raise their prices the way they did.
I got plenty of other options. Fuck em.
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Have they checked under the sofa cushions?
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They managed to keep most of their customers. Their lower price should allow them to expand their customer base a lot more quickly. The 20% reduction in per customer revenue will have had a much bigger impact. This is somewhat mitigated by the customers who actually do pay the extra, and the reduced cost from only having to provide one service to the rest.
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That's not accurate, their most recent subscriber numbers were down to 23.8m subscribers. They also lost nearly a million dollars a month worth of revenue, if not more from it. $12m might not be a lot in the grand scheme of things, but right now the competition is heating up and if they're wanting to expand to other countries, they're going to need it, not to mention licensing new content.
You also have to keep in mind that Blockbuster offers the same DVD service that Netflix does, but with the added bonus o
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This article [cnn.com] claims that Netflix's (sic?) licensing fees are going to go from $180 million in 2010 to $2 billion in 2012. It was in the face of this impending tidal-wave that Netflix hiked its pr
Fix the existing problems first (Score:1)
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Works fine on FF7 here. Seems like the problem is you.
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Heck, they broke AV sync recently. Some software upgrade boned things on Android (I managed to find an old package uploaded to a forum thread on this issue). FFS, I saw it on Roku last night.
Really, how does this escape testing?
Not enough bandwidth for this to work (Score:1)
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It's not so much of an issue in areas with fibre optic cable service, which inevitably happen to be very heavily populated. If you've got ADSL, you're stuffed, but I think there are enough customers in cabled areas just now for them to launch. (Lovefilm has a very popular streaming service of its own already.)
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Define 'popular'. 18 out of the last 20 DVDs that I rented from Lovefilm were not available for streaming.
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It'll depend on your exchange - if they've got fibre you should be fine, but several exchanges near Oxford have only been upgraded fairly recently, so if you're in the wrong area (particularly one of the more rural areas) then you may be stuck.
The Cowley, Whitney, and Wallingford exchanges should be upgraded in the next couple of months, Thame and Carteton should be done early next year, and Kiddlington's probably more than six months off.
Summertown, Headington, Abingdon, Oxford and Didcot have all already
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Change ISPs.
Its probably worse than that.. (Score:2)
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The cost of a full price DVD hovers around $20-22 while nexflix is about $15 for both services. It would take 3 DVDs purchased to equal 4 months of service. Cable is hovering between $60-120 a month. The equivalent costs are so much higher on netflix with the margins lower. So if you are acknowledging the issue is copyright holders why would you still attack your one friend in the fight?
Amazon is only interested in getting customers then driving the price up as netflix was forced to do. The rest of the
Netcraft confirm Netflix is dead. (Score:1)
No idea what that means really.
DVDs by mail in the UK (Score:2)
(No DVDs by mail, though. That's so 'Oughts.')
Yes, and there's well-entrenched incumbents in that market too. Why go into a bruising fight with a company that is already dominating a market when you don't have to? Going streaming-only lets you (try to) end-run around them instead.
Netflix uses DRM (Score:2)
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Netflix has a streaming-only model, so it's not like you're giving up any capabilities other than using it on a Linux desktop.
With that said, if you refuse to consume any media you can't consume with a Linux desktop, I totally understand. Thanks for fighting the good fight. Enjoy your three movies.
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I have just set up a VM running XP to watch streaming netflix.
I've done this before too. If you use vmware player the performance is fine. It's a bit of a drag to have to load Windows just to play Netflix, though.
Now we just use a Wii. The resolution is crap but my connection peaks out at 1.5Mbps right now so who cares.
Don't get your hopes up... (Score:1)
... they'll probably change their mind next week.
Netflix expands its service countries... (Score:1)
... now if only they could expand their library. :(
'00 (Score:2)
That's so 'Oughts.'
The term is "the noughties" [wikipedia.org].
Name The Decade (Score:2)
That's so 'Oughts.'
I prefer the term "Naughties", which I heard from Adam Savage on Mythbusters.