Wednesday 20 October 2010

Finally! (non-poker related)

WARNING: Canadian entertainment ramblings below, eh, not an ounce of poker in this post.

Netflix finally launched in Canada last month -- streaming content -- and I signed up right away for the 30 day trial. I've spent a good couple of hours in the movie rating section already so that I can get some good suggestions. It's also oddly addicting. Apparently I've watched at least 700 movies that I specifically remember were bad/decent/good in the past 12 years. That comes out to 1 movie every 6 days, which is kind of an understatement considering that the standard equation for movie watching is movies/week = 2 - (x)(children) unless of course you count The Tigger Movie and the Sesame Street movie Follow That Bird as movies.

So despite the 700 I've rated so far, there are a total of 80 in the Watch It Again section. Not terrible I suppose but they really need to get their act together in terms of selection. I'd estimate that of 2009-2010 material, it's probably closer to 5% max of total movies and TV out there. I was instantly disappointed when my first search for The Office came up blank.

I'm not really sure why this is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it might have something to do with our overzealous cultural protectorate over at the CRTC which requires some obscenely high % of content shown in this country to be Canadian produced. So we end up with a boatload full of half assed filler material designed to make sure you sleep-in or put you back to sleep when it's all crammed into early Sunday morning when no one's watching and runs until NFL afternoon kickoff. I think the last decent Canadian show I've watched in prime time would have to be Corner Gas. I can't remember anything else before or after that. My bet's on CRTC shenanigans or Netflix is just slacking when it comes to licensing

Oh well, can't really complain when I'm paying crazy amounts for cable and satellite's no better. I can live with paying $7.99/month for poor movie selection and cut out half of the cable packages I don't watch anyways instead. I did manage to find about 100 movies they have available that I haven't seen yet that might be worthwhile. Hoping that will tide me over until they start ramping up availability.

I've been holding off on buying a PS3 and a new TV for a while now so I've been watching movies on everything but my TV. Desktop, netbook, ipod. Kind of funny that I have a Wii and was looking through their app store on Saturday saying this is stupid, they should have a Netflix app, while I was waiting for the required disk to show up in the mail. I finally get it in the mail today and simultaneously check my email on the way back home to find out that they've just launched a downloadable Wii app ("don't worry about sending the disk back," gee thanks). Read my mind, good job guys.

Come on Netflix. The Office (US version). One time!

No comments:

Post a Comment