TORONTO – Netflix CEO Reed Hastings will be in Toronto this morning to officially launch Netflix in Canada.
The service here will apparently not include the successful DVD-by-mail service the company runs in the States. In Canada, the plan is apparently streaming only.
It will be interesting what sort of content Netflix will have on offer in Canada and how it will be priced. In the States, members pay just $8.99 a month for unlimited content streaming, but the content available tends not to be recent releases and instead movies like Wall Street and World Trade Centre, or TV shows such as the earlier seasons of Dexter and Family Guy.
So this will potentially be a threat to broadcasters and specialty services which air repeats of these shows and movies, for example. But until the 9:30 press conference, we’re not sure what rights Netflix has secured for Canada.
The company said in its pre-launch press release in July that Canadian Netflix members will be able to instantly watch a broad array of movies and TV episodes right on their TVs (via devices like Xbox 360, Sony’s PS3 and Nintendo’s Wii consoles; connected Blu-ray disc players from Samsung, LG and Insignia; Internet TVs from LG, Sony and VIZIO; the Roku digital video player and TiVo digital video recorders and Apple’s iPad tablet) or PCs via a range of consumer electronics devices capable of streaming from Netflix.
