Tuesday 3 January 2012

Quickflix WatchNow not yet worth it

Technically, I was part of the free trial of Quickflix's WatchNow streaming service, before it went fully live, but I didn't watch anything during that time. Why? Two reasons. First, during the trial, it was only open to Sony Bravia TVs and DVD players connected to the internet. Since I own neither one of those very specific devices, I was unable to participate. It is possible that access to ordinary computers was opened up later during that free trial, but I didn't notice whether that was the case. It is now, if you're wondering. The second reason is that not one of the movies in my queue was available for streaming. From a glance at the website, the emphasised launch titles were Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Batman (the 1989 Michael Keaton one). I've seen those already, and using them as a trial for a streaming service seemed a waste of bandwidth.

I'm sure the Quickflix team would be dismayed at my shallow engagement with their newest, shiniest service, but the library just wasn't comprehensive enough for me. I'm also sure that's not Quickflix's fault - I'm guessing movie publishers are holding back their catalogues for their own reasons. By my calculations, for the big launch, less than 1% of the Quickflix catalogue was available for streaming, which is pretty disappointing. That means, if you've got a queue with 100 movies waiting to be sent to you, you might find 1 to stream, if you're very lucky.

I'm not saying all this to bad-mouth Quickflix at all. I've been a customer for quite a while now, I enjoy the disc-by-mail service and plan to continue using it for a long time yet. I'm just saying that for me right now, the streaming service is not worth it, because of a limited catalogue and lack of device support.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do want a movie streaming service.
PPS - But if the catalogue is going to be artificially limited, I'm not sold on it yet.

No comments: