Netflix touches down in Canada this fall | Hacker News Reader

Netflix touches down in Canada this fall

business.financialpost.com

25 pointsrpledge18 comments

Can a US Netflix user describe to us Canadians what is available on their streaming service? Are films coming out at the same time as they do on DVD? What TV is available? Most TV series from big networks? Any smaller networks? HBO & Showtime?

How the video and audio quality when you stream? Closer to 480p?

Now when I go to Netflix.com they just redirect me to the placeholder at netflix.ca..

The content for Canada will be different than the content for the US. Different rights holders and different licensing.

the SD streams are 480p, the HD streams are 720p.

It is interesting that this is streaming-only.

I'm sure streaming is more profitable for them than dealing with physical discs. I'm stoked, if the selection is as good as I hear it is in the US I'll be dropping a lot of my cable channels.

I'll be dropping my megavideo subscription

One day in the not-too-distant future, we'll see a headline here "Netflix stops mailing discs to US customers, goes streaming-only." It's (mostly? ideally?) all about the most efficient and user-accepted way to move the bits around.

I remember reading somewhere that the reason they called the company Netflix (and not something like, say, Mailflix) was that the distribution model was always intended to be flexible.

Netflix (like Amazon with books) has a long way to go before all the movies that are available on DVD are also available on streaming. Also Blu-ray customers would be disappointed unless Netflix can stream in 1080p, which is difficult across a high bandwidth wireless network, let alone the Intranet.

The quality is just not as good yet.

Maybe some Canadians can chime in on the Canadian Post. When I was a credit analyst that dealt with Canada, many people would not get their mail every day or have a reliable way to send it back. Many would take their bill payments into a bank or store or whatever and pay them.

This may be the reason streaming only works much better. In fact that's the first thought I had, "I wonder how they are going to deal with the Canadian mail system."

This seemed to vary by province/region. I remember some towns way out east having only a few phones (in the local store). And I remember thinking, "wow, and we think the Midwest is isoloated."

Canadian mail is slower than US mail, plus there's no deliveries on Saturday, so Netflix wouldn't be quite as good a value. Zip.ca, a similar service, does one thing that helps get around this - it has an honor system where you can say "I've mailed this movie back today" and it will ship out the next one.

I was a zip.ca subscriber for a couple of years. The service itself was okay, but I eventually cancelled when half of my returns started going 'lost' in the mail.

There are some postmen with suspiciously great DVD collections out there.

There's an existing and established competitor in the mailed DVDs business: http://www.zip.ca/

Postal service has always been good for; depends how far back you're talking.

When were you a credit analyst that dealt with Canada?

I'd guess that cost is also an issue. The Canadian market is a tenth the size of the US but is spread out across the entire continent. One of my startups ships kids books. We pay $8 to ship from Toronto to Vancouver using Canada Post and that's with a large volume discount, but if I want to ship to the US using USPS from our New York distribution center, I pay $2.30 to anywhere in the lower 48. Also, the US deliveries take no more than 3 days, while Canada Post takes up to 5 business days - and that's expedited.

Having said all that, why bother setting up the logistics required to ship DVDs when you can just stream them to a population that is heavily wired and internet literate.

Any Canadians here that can comment about your country's postal service?

Rates, delivery times, etc.

Stamps are as follows:

$0.57 Nationally

$1.00 To the United States.

The delivery times vary from a single day to week, depending on the destination.

I do not believe that Netflix will ever ship dvd's from the states as Custom's Brokerage fees are quite high.

Finally! Maybe this will force ISPs to raise the bandwidth cap.

Not to rain on the parade, but I think it's unlikely considering the largest ISPs are also TV providers.

When an eventual CRTC ruling declaring the caps anti-competitive is your best hope, you know not to expect much fast.

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