Netflix UK review - 3 months later

When Netflix commenced its onslaught into the digital video market in the US, us Brits were left waiting for some time to see their service arrive at our shores. Well in January this year that finally became a reality when Netflix launched its UK service complete with online streaming, iPhone/iPad app plus PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii channels - the complete digital video package.

I, like many others, signed up for the free 30 day service at launch and since then have been paying £5.99 a month, but the question is will we all still be subscribing in the future? After all, here in the UK we already have access to LoveFilm, iTunes, Blockbuster, Sky Box Office, TiVo, Apple TV and many others. And a lot of people will have only signed up for the free period. What does Netflix offer that their competitors don’t?

Keep watching
What Netflix does really well is give you a great cross-platform experience. If you start watching a film on your Mac, you can go to the living room and pick it up where you left off on the Wii. If you’re then sitting in McDonald’s eating a healthy green salad with no dressing, you can continue watching on the iPhone and Netflix will remember where you were in the film. It’s a brilliant experience in practice and encourages you to watch more films as you know you can watch them wherever you are. Mid-week recently I watched Rutger Hauer exploitation flick Hobo with a Shotgun over three evenings on my iPhone, a film I probably never would have got round to seeing if I had to watch in one sitting (check it out, entertaining but not for the faint-hearted).

The second handy feature of Netflix is Recommendations - you can like/dislike films and TV shows and Netflix will recommend others based on your viewing preferences and history. It also contains various other lists based on genre, i.e. the top horror films or those that are popular on Facebook. You also find some great documentaries that you may not have caught if you were browsing in your local video store – King of Kong, a fantastic doc on the arcade-classic Donkey Kong.

For the kids
If you share your TV with kids, then you’ll also be pleased to know that the Wii channel (and possibly the PS3 too) feature a ‘Just Kids’ channel which allows you to filter out all of the unsuitable content and just display cartoons, family films, Bob the Builder, etc. And the children’s TV content is great too – you’ve got series after series of loads of their favourites to keep them entertained although you’ll notice a couple of key franchises currently missing.

Content is king
And that readers is where Netflix is currently falling down – a lack of new content overall and new releases. If they want customers to replace their Sky Movies or Apple TV with Netflix then they need to improve the number of new releases on there. You will be entertained for a few months whilst you work your way through their back catalogue of TV and film (and there is a lot of great TV on there – Spooks, Red Dwarf or Prison Break anyone?), but you won’t find any Game of Thrones, American Horror Story or some of the other more recent big names. On the film front, as I look at the homepage now I’m being offered Pulp Fiction, The Rock, This is England and The Princess Bride – all brilliant films, but of course I’ve seen them all many times before and/or already own them.

So in summary, a pretty good start, a slick customer experience and you can see the long-term potential but Netflix, like the early version iTunes Movies, needs new and up to date content to really succeed long-term and banish the competition from our living rooms.

Netflix can be found over at www.netflix.com/UK (opens in a new window)