Netflix tempts binge viewers with House of Cards pilot freebie Netflix is making the pilot episode of its made-for-IPTV series House of Cards free to anyone to watch, whether they’re one of the streaming service’s 33 million subscribers or not. The entire 13-part series went live en masse on Netflix late last week. Rather than run the series episode by episode, week by week, Netflix …
And it's really very watchable, too. Kevin Spacey's asides to the camera really make it.
If you have a Playstation or a Samsung (likely other brands, too) smart TV then you don't need Silverlight, you'll already have access to netflix. if you have an XBOX you can of course pay again for the privilege of accessing your netflix account with XBOX Gold membership. Hmm my S3 has netflix too, so Android users as well - dunno if appleists have it, I'd imagine so.
So really, only if you're kind of stuck in the land of watching stuff on a computer monitor only.
Here in the US at least, the original, To Play the King and The Final Cut are all carried; at twelve episodes in total they're a very entertaining way to spend a weekend.
I haven't watched the Spacey version yet but I guess there'll be some severe adjustments as if you wanted to ascend to President without winning a national election then you'd need Ford-style to be Speaker of the House and for President and Vice President to resign or die. It's happened exactly once under exceptional circumstances — it's not at all like in the UK where the PM only needs the support of the majority of his peers, giving us relatively frequent 'unelected' leaders like Callaghan, Major (at first) and Brown.
Does this business model work? Just some back of a fag packet calculations, but if they have 33 million subscribers, paying roughly $100 a year (For the US pricing 7.99 * 12 comes to less but I'm being generous), that comes to 3.3 billion, which leaves 1.7 million short on rights alone (at 5 billion*) without the acquisition cost and the cost of running the service. I would imagine that the rights cost will scale with subscriber base to some degree.
From my perspective this is great, the service works and costs peanuts, but doesn't seem all that sustainable to me.
* Of course if that 5 billion is what was spent on multi-year deals negotiated last year that all of the above is wrong.
No! It's annoying enough on Radio 5 Live when they keep referring to the visual feed, let's not go down that road on good old Radio 4. It's bad enough when they put all the presenters' photos on the website, totally smashing my image I had of them.
Like The Burkiss Way said: "Adapted for radio by poking your eyes out!" :)
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