OPINION – On the 6th of January 2016 on CES the CEO of Netflix has announced that they are going live… WORLDWIDE. With that millions of new people can subscribe to the service all around the globe. The streaming site that is immensely popular has now been opened to all, and with that, a new form of entertainment has been opened for everyone. Binge Watching! The question is: Is this worth it?

Let’s get down to business… welcome world to the exciting world of Netflix. First off if you are not sure if this service is worth it, you can try it out for a month for free. Please note though that you’ll still need to add your CC details, so if you do try it for free don’t like it do not forget to unsubscribe at the end of your trial period.

The Good!

After registering and completing all the details (Plus selecting a few movies that allow Netflix to pinpoint your movie taste), you’ll be brought to a sleek, elegant interface that is simple to navigate. The videos are divided into categories (genres), so it is easy to look around and check what suits you. The system also makes recommendations based on watched and added movies to your personal list. It’s impeccable and allows people to see new shows.

All of the shows can be viewed in HD (1080p), or the highest quality for shows that were not remastered for HD or is too old to be in HD format (Some of the old shows and cartoons are like this). Still there is a huge list of shows and movies that can be viewed on Netflix and the list just keeps growing. Another fun part is that if you have good enough internet, you can watch shows from your Tablet or Ipad. Though quality and speed might suffer in some cases.

The Bad!

Here’s the problem though with streaming, it requires firepower like hell to run a 1080P stream and to be quite frank I am not sure if everyone has that kind of internet service. It’s one thing to download a game from Steam or PSN for an hour and go back to your daily task, but if your internet is not good enough then if someone else tries to do anything well that might cause a problem. I’m using a 120MBit/s internet here, and it runs like a swiss cheese, but even I try to be careful with this thing, and I wonder how it would operate with three other devices using the internet.

Also, the categories are helpful, but the problem is that several movies can go over categories and at times you’ll see the same movie in different genres… which is a bit of a blunder? Still I’m waiting for the inevitable horror movie ending up in the kids section scandal on one of the European countries lists.

Furthermore, while the service does stream up to 1080p there’s a problem that you’ll face if you do not have Edge, Internet Explorer or Safari. As Mozilla and Chrome do not support 1080p streaming at all due to licensing and other issues. Here is the full list of supported browsers and resolutions for each of them:

• Google Chrome up to 720p
• The Internet Explorer up to 1080p
• Microsoft Edge up to 1080p
• Mozilla Firefox up to 720p
• Opera up to 720p
• Safari up to 1080p on Mac OS X 10.10.3 or later

So be careful on which browser you open Netflix, or you might get a poor experience. Console users do not have to worry about this as there is no such restriction active. The subtitles that are included for the programs are fairly limited currently (English, Spanish, French and Italian in some cases). Also, the subtitles can be a bit low quality in fonts, and the speed of them during the shows is hit and miss. Their size is also either really small or too big, hope the provider fixes it sooner or later.

The Ugly!

Well now comes the sad part of the entire experience, the content itself for the rest of the world is… limited to say the least. It was expected, but to many other countries are complaining that House of Cards or Arrested Development is not available. Which is likely because in those countries other channels, providers have the streaming rights and because of that I feel that Netflix is a bit late to the party. This should have been done two years ago, as now many shows might not be available for the users in certain countries.

We also have the problem of Netflix trying to create its content, which is while usually high quality they do make huge misfires such as allowing Adam Sandler to make five new movies exclusively for Netflix. While this is okay in America since they have Hulu and Amazon Prime as the substitute but what will the International community do when something cannot be viewed due to licensing issues. We do hope that Netflix will add region-specific movies and country specific ones to sweeten the deal, but currently, we only see a bare minimum of the content that is available to the US and Canadian users.

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