Canadian Netflix Impressions

It was a long time coming, but it's finally here as of September 22nd. Rejoice Canadians! We now have Netflix..... well sort of. Check after the break for my impressions of Netflix in Canada...

As I said earlier, as of September 22nd everyone in Canada who has a Wii, PS3, iPad / iPhone, or PC (Xbox 360 coming soon) can now sign up for a free month of the streaming service giant here. The sign up is painless and quick, and took me no time at all to get up and running on my PS3. A bonus to Canadian users is the PS3 does not require a disk. There is a dedicated App you can download directly from PSN.

The Wii however does rquire a streaming disc. I ordered one right away, and it took about a week to arrive even though the Netflix rep told me it would only be 2 days tops. The Wii was surprisingly easy to use as well. After popping in the disk, and putting the number provided into my Netflix account on my computer, my girlfriend was up and running watching Curious George with her nephew.

Now to the selection. The poor, poor selection.

Here's where the Canadian Netflix struggles for me. From my personal "guesstimate" and experience, we only get around 40% of the content that our fellow Americans do. The first night I tried to watch Ghostbusters..... Unavailable. So I searched for Conan the Barbarian...... Unavailable. Needless to say I searched for a lot of my favorite classics to no avail. Not to say nothing is available. It is still a decent service. It's just far off from replacing my cable provider.

There was also a huge PR stunt that went horribly wrong in Toronto. Netflix had hired some extras to stand in the crowd and look excited. Apparently though, they started talking to news reporters about how "great Netflix was" and "how excited they were". When called on it, Netflix admitted to their wrongdoing, and apologized as you can see here.

My personal thoughts are that Netflix has a long way to go in Canada, but hopefully it won't take that long. Right now if you get a chance, get the free month. Hell, 7.99 a month is not bad for the selection as is. If you wanna take the plunge, I say go for it. Just don't expect a very robust service right out of the gate.