At the click of a button

A new world of digital television was introduced to us about a month back. Majority of the population was finally excited to have original content being available for them to stream.

So when Netflix announced their launch a month back, many Bengalureans happily jumped to the opportunity to get their hands on the free subscription.  Netflix is a global video content provider where one can stream everything from movies, television series, documentaries and many other original content produced by the channel themselves. It started as an American DVD-by-mail service in 1998 and was finally open to streaming in 2007.

As fancy as this may sound, there were a few challenges that one needed to take upon to finally get their hands on this streaming channel. Having a credit card was one of them. Though the first month gives free subscription, one needed a credit card to register for the account. And when the trial period is over, one needs to manually unsubscribe to it so that it does not get charged to the credit card.

An IT professional, Jerin Mathew, was one such enthusiastic youngster who went ahead and claimed his free subscription. Talking about his experience since then, he says, “I’ve been using Netflix for about a month now and I think the playback feature it has is amazing. For example, if you keep skipping the introduction of a show, it learns to automatically skip it from the next time onwards. However, it would be great if the content was regularly updated.”

This is one of the issues that many seem to be facing — updates of the content. Since it’s launch in the country, there are only limited shows and movies that one can stream. Radhika Mukhija, a professional artist, says, “It’s great that they have a variety of Hollywood movies and shows that one can watch, but for an audience like us, it would be better if they included more of Bollywood movies as well.”

But that doesn’t seem to be much of a problem for Richa Gupta and Denver D’Souza, a food blogger and territory manager. They say, “We have never owned a television in our house, so when Netflix came to town, we thought it would be great for us. We watch a lot of shows during the weekdays and movies during the weekends. We’ve discovered some new ones that we didn’t even know existed, like ‘Broadchurch’ and so many other interesting documentaries. We do binge watch a lot but we’re not really complaining about it.” In the current scenario where torrents are ruling, Netflix is a safe and legal way of streaming content online. Jayshree Basappa, a lecturer, says, “I love how Netflix works on even a dreadfully slow network. It’s nice that more than one person can use a single account. But I’m still debating if I want to resubscribe to it or not.”

With both pros and cons to this streaming service, not all Bengalureans are sure if they want to continue subscribing for the same. However, many do agree that it is better than television. Jerin says, “It definitely makes more sense to have Netflix than cable because you can watch what you want and avoid all the repetition and time consuming advertisements.” As for the enthusiasts, they are looking forward to newer updates and let the binging begin.