Since 2008 I’ve been hearing how great Netflix is with it’s streaming movies and TV shows. This is a service I’ve dreamed of, a legal and easy way to watch my favourite stuff online. So when it came to Ireland and offered my the first thirty days free, I more then jumped at the chance.
In this day and age it is quiet easy to spend a lot of that hard earned cash on buying/renting movies and such, who has time to watch it when it comes on TV anymore? So after having Netflix for 30 days here are my thoughts.
At first glance the library is pretty large, but still no where near its US counterpart, probably due to the fiasco that is international licencing agreements. There is a search but the primary way of navigating is via various categories displayed to you by Netflix. The first couple are always Recently watched, Top 10 for Sean (presumably it will be different for you), New Releases and most popular on Facebook. Its the categories that are displayed after this is where it gets cool. As you watch and rate movies and shows, Netflix will learn what you like and dislike and will try to show you stuff you will be interested. For example on my current Netflix box, I have “Exciting TV Shows”, “Quirky British TV Shows”, “Foreign Dramas” or will have recommendation related to other shows you watched “More Like: Shows you have watched”
It seems to display a max for 75 shows or movies per category, even though there seems like there would be more than 75 items for that in the library. As you progress and Netflix gets to know you it’s suggestions can be uncannily accurate, it can spit up rare and hard to find gems that would be nigh impossible to find, very expensive to track down, or have to illegally download if you wanted access to them (not we here at the Arcade would ever condone such behaviour…*cough*). So as a result of this I’m catching up on the 90’s Iron Man and Sonic the Hedgehog (the good one, SatAM) among other things. It’s also a great way to catch that thing you kinda wanted to watch, but didn’t want to put the effort into actually tracking down i.e. a boxset containing all 173 episodes of Charmed or necessarily need said boxset taking up valuable shelf space.
You can rate things from one to five stars if you so choose, which inturn Netflix will use to suggest more items of interest to you.
Now one of the most important factors is image and audio quality, Netflix is pretty smart in that it will constantly evaluate your connection and give you the best possible viewing experience. A minimum of 1Mb broadband is recommend, which is all my country Internet can muster but with that I get a pretty good experience, not full HD and the occasional artifacts but overall I have no complaints and obviously the better your connection the better the service will be. A word of warning though if you are working with a small to medium download cap, Netflix would be a good way to go over your limit.
You can stream to whole assortment of devices. From your computer to iPhone. I’ve been using primarily on PS3 because it’s connected to my biggest screen. Wii and Xbox 360 are also supported.
During the first 30 days I did notice a few new things pop up, but not a whole lot so you could conceivably run out of things to watch. I also should note that almost every genre is covered fairly well, while the anime section remains pretty slim.
It’s priced at only €7.99 per month thats great value for such a low cost. If you are still unsure and the free 30 days offer is still effect definitely try it out, Its free and what’s the worst that can happen? You get caught up on Charmed? That’s not a bad thing, right?
NetFlix…you can stay!
