Reasons not to take Netflix for granted

I’m not talking about Netflix the streaming giant, the original studio, the industry disruptor, the

content fire hose, the Spielberg annoyer, the millennial way of life or, way back when, the DVD-through-the-mail service.

No, today I want to talk to you about Netflix, the technological platform.

It would be easy to forget just how dang well this thing works … unless you have something subpar to compare it to.

We don’t subscribe to any of Netflix’s US competitors, in part because they weren’t available when we first got to Australia, and in part because Netflix is enough for us. I know we miss out on original content on Amazon, Hulu, all that, but there’s so much original content in general that it hardly seems worth crying over missing any particular subsection of it.

We do, however, subscribe to Stan, an Australian streaming service that has worked out a number of great content deals. Stan is carrying Disney/Marvel/Star Wars in Australia, as well as, I believe, every single Bond movie. (No time like the present to pick up where I left off six years ago, when my chronological viewing of the Connery movies stopped at Goldfinger.) Stan also gives us access to random American peak TV shows that we love, like Better Call Saul.

But as a streaming technology, Stan sucks.

At first we thought the poor resolution and the buffering were a function of our internet, and in truth, that’s somewhat to blame. Despite living just outside the city in North Melbourne, an eminently cosmopolitan area, we do not yet have the Nationwide Broadband Network, known to everyone as the NBN. Areas farther away and even some areas in the boonies have it, but we don’t yet. When this does one day happen, it should help improve our shit internet.

But that same internet does not contain a single performance issue when watching something on Netflix. Not a blip. Not a drop. Not a single delay.

It got so bad this past week that I had to stop my rewatch of Exit Through the Gift Shop on Wednesday night because it wouldn’t play more than five seconds without pausing for more than five seconds. In fact, the only way to finish it was to shift the viewing to my phone, which uses the same internet, but is apparently more sophisticated than my TV set up in terms of delivering the actual content. It was still bad, but it was enough improved that it was reasonable to persevere, and the remaining 40 minutes of the movie probably took only about 45 minutes to watch. As opposed to, I don’t know, a million.

I’d hoped that was just a single bad evening, but then my wife’s and my joint viewing of Book Week on Saturday night was similarly disrupted. In this case we were able to get better results by restarting our Fetch box, the device through which we stream Stan.

But even at its best, when it does not buffer, Stan delivers a sub-optimal viewing experience, looking grainy and a bit unfocused. Taking advantage of the Disney/Marvel deal, I watched both Iron Man 3 and Inside Out through Stan within the past few months, and neither popped the way it should have. Tellingly, during that time I also rewatched Avengers: Infinity War, but I watched it on a DVD borrowed from the library even though it was available through Stan. It looked a million times better.

If you’re opting to borrow something from the library because you know the version you have available at a touch of your fingertips is not going to be good enough, it kind of defeats the whole purpose.

And yet we don’t really want to unsubscribe from Stan because of the access to Better Call Saul and the like. Plus our kids have just discovered some shows on there they really like. Strangely, these shows do not have an issue streaming for them, but that could be because they watch them in the morning. So maybe competing during the peak nighttime viewing hours with other subscribers is also factoring in. Which it really should not.

All this is not to go on at length about Stan and its deficiencies. Stan will improve over time, I’m sure, to the extent that its budget and the talent it hires will allow it.

Instead, it’s just to be reminded that when you are paying that very small amount per month for that very large amount of content, Netflix is also giving you a viewing experience that is as good as DVD.

And when you’ve seen the alternative, it’s something to appreciate indeed.