Even though I was less than impressed with the range of films and TV shows on the new Netflix service in the UK I decided I would give the service a go (having heard good stuff about the service in the US0 and you get a free trial for a month, so it wasn’t going to cost me anything.
I left it for a few days as I expected that everyone else in the UK would be trying out the service and this would have an impact on Netflix’s servers.
So far I have watched the service on my iMac through the Safari browser, through the Apple TV and using the iPad App.
The iPad app works really well, and I have had no buffering issues, and was really pleased with the quality, which was a good as BBC iPlayer and even Home Streaming from my iTunes collection.
Netflix “appeared” on my Apple TV menu, without me needing to do anything. The navigation was fine and again streaming quality was excellent.
Through the Safari browser, most of the time it was okay, but I did have more issues than through the iPad or Apple TV. Netflix uses Silverlight and though I updated the plugin I did have a few stuttering issues. I know this wasn’t a bandwidth issue as if I streamed the same content on the iPad, it worked fine. I also found that I couldn’t interact with the video controls on the Silverlight player, so the pause button didn’t work, but the space bar did to pause the video.
Overall I was impressed with the technical side of Netflix and if I was to continue with a subscription then I know it would work with my system.
As for the content, I think I *may* be able to justify the £5.99 a month it costs, but I would expect to either see an increase in the quantity of content on the service or regular new releases. Netflix is not the place to see new stuff, but from a back catalogue perspective I do expect to be able to see more than there is in there now.