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Those vintage suits aren’t cheap–Netflix’s plans to add AMC costume drama Mad Men to its streaming offering will costs the movie service somewhere between $75 and $100 million according to unnamed sources at The Wall Street Journal. That number works out to mind boggling $1 million an episode.
In a nice rebound from last week, Netflix is expanding its non-exclusive agreement with Fox for content, bringing older shows Ally McBeal and The Wonder Years to Watch Instantly for the first time. Also arriving are the first season of Glee and the first two seasons of Sons of Anarchy from FX with additional seasons to be added annually, as well as “a number of library movies” after their premium pay-tv windows subside. It’s not exactly the cable TV competing type of deal that it just locked up with Paramount in Canada, but fans of those shows have a few more reasons to hang on to the service. Beyond the announcement a slew of new content popped up on the service today including the just-aired premiere episode of Body of Proof, BBC stuff like Top Gear and Luther, a few James Bond flicks and anime like Inuyasha and Bleach, so even if you’re not a gleek (and disappointed because if Netflix and Fox are talking, the only topics of discussion should be commissioning new seasons of Firefly and Terriers) there’s plenty of reasons to update that queue today.
Continue reading Netflix adds more Fox content to streaming including Glee S1, Ally McBeal
Netflix adds more Fox content to streaming including Glee S1, Ally McBeal originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Apr 2011 11:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
It’s no secret that Netflix has grand plans to expand its global footprint that now feeds media to some 20 million North American subscribers. Hell, the company was boasting of the “significant dollars” allocated to its 2011 international expansion plans just four months ago. While nothing’s official yet, we’ve unearthed a few tantalizing openings posted to the Netflix job site over the last few days that could point to an imminent launch. Notably, Netflix’s customer service call center in Hillsboro Oregon is gearing up to expand its scope of operations beyond North America. Two new job postings for a Training Supervisor and Quality Assurance Analyst both mention the need to prepare for “rapid” international expansion and “will support a specific country / region outside of North America.” The Training Supervisor is being hired specifically to educate customer service reps in preparation for that future international growth. Neflix is looking for fluency in English in addition to Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), and Spanish (Latin American and European), leaving things pretty wide open with regard to the countries targeted for initial launch.
We do know that Netflix had plans to launch in the UK way back in 2004 — plans that were ultimately scrapped in order to focus on its core US business (and later Canada). But if not the UK then we should at least expect to see Netflix target the European continent first if a statement attributed to CEO Reed Hastings from way back in January of 2010 still rings true: “the big market for Hollywood content (after the U.S.) is Europe…Third is Asia. Fourth is the rest of the world.” Can’t let Amazon have the market to itself now can we Reed?
[Thanks, Chico]
Netflix beefing up service center in preparation for global launch originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Mar 2011 02:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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By Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
Netflix announced last night that Canadian users will, by default, receive lower-quality—and lower-bandwidth—streaming video. The change was made to protect users, “because many Canadian Internet service providers unfortunately enforce monthly caps on the total amount of data consumed.”
Fast Internet connections could previously chew through 30-70GB of data while streaming 30 hours of Netflix video in a month. Data caps for the Rogers cable operator and for Bell Canada start at 2GB per month; cable operator Shaw starts at 15GB.
Faced with the prospect of users thinking twice before streaming anything on Netflix, the company has decided to put Canadians into a default “Good” streaming tier that will transfer only 625Kbps (which works out to 0.3GB per hour), using up 9GB a month if someone watches 30 hours of Netflix. The move is designed to keep users from exceeding their caps by accident.
The company admits that “there is some lessening of picture quality with these new settings” but insists that “the experience continues to be great.” Customers can manually switch their accounts to two higher levels of service, “Better” (0.7GB per hour) and “Best” (1GB per hour with standard definition content, 2.3GB per hour for HD content).
Netflix will continue to use adaptive streaming, which reduces the stream bit-rate in cases of congestion or low-speed connections, but this is the first time Netflix is purposely dialing back video quality and size for connections perfectly capable of handling the larger streams.
The major Canadian ISPs—Shaw, Rogers, and Bell Canada—all offer separate pay-TV services of their own. Netflix has offered its own streaming service in Canada for only eight months, and ISPs like Rogers welcomed Netflix to the country by lowering the data caps on some tiers. (One lower-priced tier dropped from 25GB to 15GB.)
Perhaps Canadians really do need a “Not Safe For Canada” badge on large files after all?
The second bit of news for Canadian Netflixers in less than 24 hours deals with the other pressing issue facing the service in the Great White North: bandwidth caps. While they exist in the U.S., many Canadian ISPs have set the max amount of data allowed at much lower levels and they may cut further if a recent CRTC decision on usage-based billing stands. In response, starting today Netflix.ca accounts all have a new Manage Video Quality setting that lets users select Good / Better / Best bitrates as defaults for their video streams. According to CPO Neil Hunt’s blog post, previously watching 30 hours of Netflix would typically consume up to 30GB of data, while now it can be as low as 9GB under the “Good” setting. Of course, dropping bitrate means lowering picture quality accordingly, despite promises that “the experience continues to be great.” Even with HD and 5.1 audio available, PQ probably isn’t your highest priority if you’ve turned to streaming, but it remains to be seen if customers find the compromise suitable, and whether a similar option comes to U.S. users facing similarly limited connections.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Netflix Canada announces new bandwidth management settings for capped users originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 23:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
So far Canadian Netflix users have had to deal with a far more limited streaming library than their US cousins, exacerbated by the lack of a DVD / Blu-ray library to fall back on, but that’s about to change. Netflix has struck a deal in Canada with Paramount for premium pay TV window access covering “exclusive subscription television rights to all first-run films.” Currently in the US Netflix’s deal with Epix gives it access to many of the same movies (Iron Man 2 — already available since the 25th in Canada, while not currently ready for streaming in the US — Titanic, Zoolander, The Last Airbender) eventually, but that’s clearly not exclusive. While it’s previously cut deals with smaller distributors like Relativity Media and Nu Image/Millennium Films for pay TV window access, the combo of exclusive and a major studio like Paramount makes Netflix a pay TV channel competitor in a whole new way. This backs up its earlier move in that direction by signing up for a new original show to debut on the service in 2012 and potentially adds a new edge to rumored negotiations for the Miramax back catalog, press release follows after the break.
Continue reading Netflix nabs exclusive subscription pay TV rights to Paramount movies — in Canada
Netflix nabs exclusive subscription pay TV rights to Paramount movies — in Canada originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 10:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Granted, it’s probably not quite time to begin hailing Facebook as a serious competitor to the Netflixes and Hulus of the world, but the social network seems to be off to a fairly strong start, considering that, until this week, the site only offered a single film: The Dark Knight.
Netlix is offering a 3 percent credit for the its recent streaming outage. On Tuesday night, due to what Netflix called a “rare technical issue,” customers encountered problems streaming movies and TV with the Netflix service for a period of an hour and 40 minutes.
To make up for all that lost viewing time, Netflix has decided to provide a small credit to its customers (something it’s done before for other outages). The 3 percent credit is available to customers with a $7.99 a month, streaming-only subscription. That means Netflix is giving them $0.23 off their next bill if they redeem the offer in the next seven days.
While $0.23 seems tiny, it definitely adds up, seeing how Netflix announced that is surpassed 20 million subscribers back in January. Still, what will you do with that $0.23 credit? It won’t buy much.
The bad news is that our bulging tips box reports Netflix’s website and Watch Instantly streaming service have been mostly inaccessible for the last couple of hours. Those lucky enough to have the page open from earlier may still have access, and devices based on older UIs are up and running while the newer HTML5 based frontends seem to be down for the count. The worse news is Crain’s New York Business reported today that a new licensing deal with Showtime will not renew streaming access to older seasons of currently airing shows like Dexter and Californication when they expire this summer. Instead, their arrangement will cover shows that are off the air like The Tudors and Sleeper Cell.
Showtime has decided to hold the fresher stuff back for its TV Everywhere portals accessible by pay-TV subscribers despite Netflix’s best efforts to pitch itself as a friend to the premium networks, which could also explain its plan to start offering original content of its own next year. Wide outages like this have been relatively rare and while we’ll just keep an eye on @NetflixHelps until it’s back up, there’s no telling what other blank spaces we might find in our instant streaming queues in the future.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Update: Things appear to be back to normal as of 10:30 p.m. EST or so, there’s no official word via Twitter yet but between the commenters below and the episode of Firefly we’re watching, it’s all good. Wait — Not so fast, while PC streaming is a go, devices are still mostly locked out.
Per @NetflixHelps UPDATE: Streaming is back on the website. We’re still working on getting streaming back to all devices. Thanks for your patience!
Update 2: From @NetflixHelps – RESOLVED: The website and devices are back up and running. Thanks again for your patience while we worked to get this fixed!
Netflix suffers temporary website outage today (fixed!), permanent Dexter outage this summer originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Mar 2011 22:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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