Netflix Coming to Canada
- Thread starter Dusty Ayres
- Start date
Good for Canada! Netflix is awesome.
You can still get French language films though...
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.
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.
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.
A
Amaris
Guest
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Commodore
I'm taking a 'wait and see' approach to this.
They're only doing a streaming only account in Canada if I read that correctly. Surely the people at zip.ca are sweating bullets, but I hope that means they'll be forced to move on their own streaming service or cut their margins even further.
The real problem is that broadband in Canada just can't handle it. I don't know how much it takes to stream a typical episode from Netflix, but I have no doubt that 60GB won't be enough for anyone.
The real problem is that broadband in Canada just can't handle it. I don't know how much it takes to stream a typical episode from Netflix, but I have no doubt that 60GB won't be enough for anyone.
Yeah, but who is willing to be the one to have to pay the overage fees to get change to happen? I suppose if millions of people end up going over they'll have no choice... but with the duopoly situation, I don't see any real incentive for change.
Well the thing is no one should be "willing" to do it. What will happen is average people who have probably never paid attention to the caps will start hitting them and this will probably prompt a big public stink about it. This will happen eventually anyway as the trend towards data rich services continues, obviously I'd rather see it happen sooner rather then later 
Similar threads
