So after nearly a decade of hearing our American mates wax lyrical about Netflix, the subscription video rental service, it appears we’ve finally had them reach our shores here in Ireland. Especially exciting now that they’re an on-demand service and not just a clunky DVD posting service (which could never realistically work in a place with such a small population as Ireland). The prospect of Netflix was also exciting with a very reasonable monthly fee of €6.99 – especially when compared to a €4.99 per film rental in the iTunes store using AppleTV.
Happy days right? Time to cancel that SkyMovies subscription, hang up the iTunes store card and banish torrents from the laptop? Well… ahem… no.
Upon taking up the first month free membership, myself and the other half excitedly started looking through the catalogue; rating films we like and dislike in order to create a “taste profile”. We then we looked through the various genres to take our pick from the “thousands of films” that were promised. Instead, we found a clunky website with poor usability and an even poorer selection of entertainment.
The best TV shows were horribly re-run (Inbetweeners) or simply way out of date (seasons 1 & 2 of Dexter, when we’d already watched up through season 4 a year ago using the iTunes store). I didn’t recognize a single “new release” and their classics were definitely lacking. In fact, I’m suspecting that these “thousands” of films didn’t even quite add up to 100. This could quite possibly explain the lack of a list system when searching, instead bringing up large images of DVD covers.
The iPad App is also very clunky, and only useful if you know exactly which title you’re looking for (if they have it, and they probably don’t!) as you can’t search by director or actor etc. We also tried connecting the AppleTV, didn’t work; but I’m told the Wii connection does indeed work here in Ireland.
So in the words of a friend after I ranted on Facebook… the whole thing is “piss poor”.
Now, I’m not ignorant, I understand that this of course is more than likely to do with distribution and licensing and agreeing terms… which probably will be agreed in the future. It is also very likely that the SkyMovies, LoveFilm and the iTunes store already have exclusivity contracts in place with distributors which are preventing NetFlix from getting hold of more films. In the meantime, my 7 bucks a month will be staying with me.
Curious to find out what the rest of the Irish early-adopters will make of our version of Netflix, I suspect I’m not alone.
