Netflix Coming to Canada

[Dusty Ayres]

After more than a decade of existence, Netflix is finally ready to go abroad. The popular video service is making its first expansion beyond U.S. borders into the great white north, Netflix said in a statement Monday. The service's Watch Instantly streaming feature will be made available to Canadian customers this fall.
The monthly subscription service will be initially available only in English, but Netflix has made clear its intentions to add the French language in the future.

Netflix Coming to Canada

[Professor Zoom]

Good for Canada! Netflix is awesome.

[ByrdMan]

Sweet deal, Canada. You're gonna love it!

And while technically it's correct, I always get a big kick out of referring to Canada as "going abroad"

[Daneel]

Interesting... I guess that means our Blockbuster Video stores are going to start rapidly closing too.

[Starbreaker]

You can still get French language films though...

[Canadave]

I'm not sure I'll sign up, to be honest. I was on zip.ca for a while, but got sick of feeling compelled to watch whatever DVD they chose to send me. And with the 60 GB of monthly bandwidth that Rogers enforces, the streaming would kill my internet bill.

Add to this the fact that there's a kickass local rental place just around the corner from where I live, and it doesn't make sense for me.

[Temis the Vorta]

You can set your own list with Netflix. They don't just send things randomly. All you need to do is to know what you're going to want to watch, in what order.

[RoJoHen]

^Yeah, you have total control over the DVDs they send you. Plus, Netflix Instant Streaming is the greatest thing ever. I just watched the entire series of The X-Files through Netflix instant streaming with my PS3.

[J. Allen]

Canadave wrote:

---

I'm not sure I'll sign up, to be honest. I was on zip.ca for a while, but got sick of feeling compelled to watch whatever DVD they chose to send me. And with the 60 GB of monthly bandwidth that Rogers enforces, the streaming would kill my internet bill.

Add to this the fact that there's a kickass local rental place just around the corner from where I live, and it doesn't make sense for me.

On top of all the things Temis and RoJoHen mentioned, you can set the video quality so that it takes up 1/4 of the bandwidth it would at high resolution, and it still looks good. Their compression rate is excellent.

[Canadave]

Temis the Vorta wrote:

---

You can set your own list with Netflix. They don't just send things randomly. All you need to do is to know what you're going to want to watch, in what order.

You can with zip.ca, too, and (except for DVDs in really high demand) they were generally good at sending stuff at or near the top of my list, but it's hard for me to watch stuff if I don't truly feel like watching it, so when it came three days later, I often wasn't up to watching whatever it was. So having a brick and motar place to pick up DVDs from often works much better for me.

And I'm still hesitant about the streaming. My girlfriend and I often hit our cap pretty easily without having movies streamable on-demand.

[Temis the Vorta]

I just set my account so I get 3 DVDs at a time and then set up my queue so it's more or less New Movie/Old or Foreign Movie/TV Series/repeat - I'm always in the mood to see one of those three categories and if not, I've always got a bunch of crap DVRed, too.

[Arrqh]

The biggest problem with zip.ca, aside from the obvious lack of streaming, is if you don't live in Ontario you're looking at long shipping times. When I was living in NJ, I had a 1 day turnaround time with Netflix but in Edmonton it was sometimes as long as a week which completely defeats the purpose of the service and the main reason why I dropped zip.

I can't even load the Canadian page they setup right now as I'm ironically currently on vacation in the US, but if they even are going to be shipping DVDs... and everything I've read so far has just talked about the streaming service, though maybe someone can correct me... I doubt that they'll have the same sorts of shipping times you get in the population centers of the US. I also wouldn't be surprised if the library available for streaming in Canada is smaller then the one in the US.

[Owain Taggart]

Yeah, very true. I hope Netflix opens up different hubs. One thing I do hope they won't do is ship from the US. They need a dedicated system.

[Hermiod]

Temis the Vorta wrote:

---

I just set my account so I get 3 DVDs at a time and then set up my queue so it's more or less New Movie/Old or Foreign Movie/TV Series/repeat - I'm always in the mood to see one of those three categories and if not, I've always got a bunch of crap DVRed, too.

Wasn't it you who started a huge thread where you tried out numerous schemes to get Netflix to stop throttling your disc choices ?

[Dusty Ayres]

I'm taking a 'wait and see' approach to this.