Update to the update (13/01/12): It turns out, whether intentionally or otherwise, that Netflix UK accounts will work in the US. Using Hide My Ass!, I successfully connected to netflix.com and was offered the full US catalogue. Haven’t tried streaming as yet (and would probably suggest that if it works – you’d best off reducing the quality of the video stream), but nonetheless this is incredibly useful. And even more so if you’re a regular traveller to the US for business/pleasure.
Netflix as seen in the UK..
Netflix as seen in the US, but with the same Netflix UK account..
Update: HD streaming on Macs (at least, and possibly PCs too) can be fixed by making sure that you’re running version 5 of Silverlight. Silverlight’s auto updater is rather crap – at least on the Mac – so you’ll have to update manually. See my blog post here for more info. HD streaming still requires that you (a) ensure you have the right quality settings enabled via the section in Your Account and (b) sufficient bandwidth via your broadband connection.
Work up this morning,
got the movie blues(*),
found Netflix UK had launched,
but it was not all good news..
(*) not blue movies!
So. Hello then, Netflix UK. You’ve finally launched your movie and TV streaming service in the UK. You’ve priced yourselves £1 above LOVEFiLM at £5.99. You offer a free trial, but only if you have a Facebonk account (good timing on my part, then). Sign up via Facebonk is ridiculously easy, you just provide a debit or credit card so that it can be charged after the free trial expires, and away you go.
Except..
1) It uses Silverlight. Apparently this is the film studio’s new friend thanks to increased/more secure DRM protection. Except that once again Linux users are left out in the cold. Despite spending 6 years in film post-production which almost exclusively used Linux workstations and renderfarms to generate content for the films, it is absolutely beyond my comprehension why Linux does not have the sufficient support of film studios (who will have saved significant amounts of money not buying OS licenses as a consequence – well, the post houses themselves will have saved on licenses but that saving will have likely benen past back to the client). Silverlight is also now being used by LOVEFiLM, so as a Linux desktop user – you’re screwed. There are no official DVD or Blu-Ray clients for Linux. There are no major VoD streaming services for Linux either. What wondrous people the film folk are.
2) There’s not really much in the way of brand new film titles, is there?
3) You’ll need to create a separate password if you’re going to use the Netflix iPhone/iPad app since that does not support Facebook logins. This isn’t a problem as such, but would be nice to see a unified system for logins.
4) Confusion of HD availability. Apparently there are HD titles, but some are available for certain devices, others for Mac/PC, and some for all. There are sub-sections that will show you what’s available for what, but I found that on some titles it stated HD Not Available, or there was no HD indicator at all despite it apparently being available for PC/Mac.
5) Quality is nowhere near as good as I thought it would be. I’m on BT Infinity with a 35Mb/s average download connection. I have set the quality to the highest, and yet there is still sufficient artefacting and lack of sharpness in the supposedly HD content. Perhaps BBC iPlayer has really spoilt me in terms of quality when it comes to HD streaming. That said, the BBC is in a very fortunate position in terms of infrastructure – and it uses Adobe technology which despite being an absolute PITA right now (the BBC iPlayer Desktop AIR client keeps crashing and AIR itself is behaving itself badly).
I think the lack of recent movie titles might be the biggest problem for Netflix. We know they have signed exclusive deals with some big movie studios, but I can’t really see much of that right now. The war between LOVEFiLM and Netflix in terms of securing content may well harm both services if there isn’t sufficient leeway for the content providers to license content to each within a reasonable timeframe. Right now LOVEFiLM is looking much stronger – especially with Amazon owning it.
Apparently I've watched The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - or Guila Do Mochilero Das Galaxias as suggested here (WTF, Netflix?)
Time will tell, but Netflix have really got to pull out all the stops by February 8th when my trial ends otherwise I’ll stick with iTunes. As for LOVEFiLM – well, they don’t offer a free trial to previous subscribers and I’m unwilling to pay to try their equivalent just yet.
Speaking of LOVEFiLM (who are owned by Amazon), I’m intrigued to discover that the UI components of the movie player and browser on Netflix are all powered by Amazon’s AWS:
host movies2.netflix.com
movies2.netflix.com is an alias for merchweb-frontend-movies2-2116622157.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
merchweb-frontend-movies2-2116622157.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com has address 176.34.231.224
whereas the actual movie content is served up from a local Level 3 PoP – for me at least – in London (at least when I was watching the netstat output of the stream and tracing the IPs). I wonder if Netflix, now they are direct competitors to Amazon in Europe, are likely to change their UI CDN provider any time soon..
Update: Not convinced Netflix UK’s Twitter team is up to much either. Ask them about availability of newer content, get ignored. The lack of newer titles is going to be extremely limiting for some people and if Netflix is going to compete with LOVEFiLM it has got to bring out the big guns NOW.
If you have a flick through Netflix’s tech blog at http://techblog.netflix.com/ , you’ll see they are quite heavily invested in Amazon’s AWS .
I suspect they’ll be one of Amazon’s larger customers and as long as Amazon keep LoveFilm and AWS as separate business entities, there shouldn’t be too much of an issue (but if it becomes “Amazon Streaming”, then there might be concern).
I /believe/ Netflix use the Internap CDN solution for actual video streaming (they provide, like Akamai, a “route optimised” service – so it can make sense to not actually cache anything on the CDN, but just use them as a routing system) in the around 20Pb per month scale (according to an Internap sales person nearly 6 months ago).
Ah, thanks for the Tech Blog link – now subscribed. I don’t think AWS has been much of a concern up until now (since Netflix hasn’t operated outside a territory in which they’ve been in competition with Amazon) but now .. now may well be a different story. Interesting to see what happens
Very poor title choice and on ps3 the ability to browse titles is poor. Very poor service. Would have thought they would have wanted to blow us away with their trial not frustrate and underwhelm us with the paucity of titles, the poor quality of titles and poorness of their online tools( there are none beyond basic search). Lovefilm
Has little to worry. Netflix may have shot iyself in the foot.
This doesn’t feel like a grand launch, more of a rushed-to-market blunder. No proper internal ticketing system linked to one’s account or email address? Support via (albeit) free phone line and public Twitter account? No recent releases and limited catalogue?
No, this isn’t a launch, it’s a badly organised fumble.
Hey, just want to point out you don’t actually need a Facebook account for the free trail, there is a link at the bottom allows you to sign up by email. And you are right, the collection is pretty poor compare with Lovefilm, however the streaming quality seems to be faster/better than Lovefilm tho. But I have to say I only tried out free content on Lovefilm site which doesn’t require an account… may be the ‘non-free’ content got better quality…