Later this year Netflix will be expanding their Watch Instantly streaming video service, making it available to Canadian residents.
In addition to being the first service offered by the home video rental giant outside the US, it will also mark the first time they have offered streaming by itself. To date their streaming video offering has been an add on to their popular rent by mail DVD and Blu-ray service.
That’s not likely to be changing any time soon for US customers. When the plan for streaming outside the US was first mentioned last October, CEO Reed Hastings was clear that it was purely due to the logistical issues of shipping discs internationally.
And selling the exclusively online service to Canadians isn’t a sure winner either. Although Netflix has made some headway in licensing new releases and increasing their selection of recent TV episodes for streaming, such arrangements are still the exception.
Canadians interested in the service can go to www.netflix.ca and sign up for email notification when the service launches.
Result for: canadian residents
Rogers has finally announced that it will indeed be bringing Apple’s iPhone to the Canadian market, meaning Canadian residents will no longer have to buy unlocked phones from the United States.
Rogers is the only GSM service provider in Canada so the choice seemed logical. However, Apple and Rogers had been in talks for over 8 months without getting anywhere.
Ted Rogers, president and CEO of Rogers Communications, announced the deal today. “We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year,” he said. “We can’t tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.”
Rogers reported a nice profit for the Q1 2008, $344 million CAD on $2.4 billion CAD revenue. Besides being the only GSM provider, the provider has a large chain of retail outlets making it easier to sell the phone from different fronts.
Result for: canadian residents
Earlier this month we reported that director Michael Moore’s latest film was to be released legally, and for free via the Internet and as of today, he has followed through with that promise.
The film, which is intended to bring out new voters for the upcoming presidential election, was made available via the movie’s official site, but more interestingly through BitTorrent as well, using the Pirate Bay tracker with PeerExchange and DHT allowed as well.
Therein lies the problem however. The film’s site says the downloads are only available to US and Canadian residents and makes it very clear that when downloading from the site you will go through an IP lookup system which will then either accept or deny your request. By putting the movie on torrents, especially extremely popular public ones such as The Pirate Bay, there is no way to enforce geographical restrictions.
Was it intentional? Was it an accident or a complete misunderstanding of how the BitTorrent protocol works? We don’t know, but more importantly, the film is available and for free, from wherever you want to get it.
