French say 'non' to Netflix, reveals entertainment report French consumers prefer to stick to good, old-fashioned live telly rather than those new-fangled digital services such as Netflix, a report has revealed. According to the reserch – carried out by Futuresource Consulting – 75 per cent of French respondents say live TV is still their primary viewing choice. The Beeb needs to be …
Why was there no mention of Canal Plus, it is subscription based channel that has been providing services for the last 20 years or so..
Canal Plus have their own offering "Canal Play" which is in direct competition with the Netflix offering.
I am not saying that either is better but it should have least been mentioned in this "incomplete" article..
PS : I know this and yet I don't even have a television....
I have netflix in France, and thankfully bypass with it with smart-dns to get the "US" version of netflix. In France, any form of "pay TV" cannot broadcast anything that has been broadcast on the TV in the last 3 years. They are struggling to get this down to 2 years. That's right, the most "recent" movie you'll be seeing is 3 years old..... no surprise then that netflix isn't taking off here, unless you understand technology enough to know you can get out of the geo-fence. Even the netflix exclusive "House of cards" has a contract with... CanaPlus... so bizarrely it's nowhere to be seen on the French version. Don't blame the service, blame the strict regulatory environment it has to operate in.
You must be new here... References to frogs, cheeses, baguettes, garlic and berets are allowed in French matters on El Reg since they merely bring about a just as stereotyped French shrug in reply. As long as the roastbeefs do not invade, nobody carees over there.
Are Netflix programs dubbed in French or subtitled ? Therein might lie the problem...
with just about every man and their dogs connected to VM down my street doing anything online between 15:00-23:59 (or thereabouts) that requires any sort of bandwidth is like going back to the 'good' old days of 56Kbps dialup.
so I come home from work and want to watch the latest episode of 'whatever' on netflix/amazon etc.
Good luck with that my friends. It just ain't gonna work.
So we record the broadcast on PVR's.
That is until the show moves to streaming only.
Guess what... they have will lose a good few viewers.
The infrastructure can't cope with its current loading. It is all very well the likes of VM saying 'here, have 100Mbps connection' when for the most popular part of the day it runs at something like 1Mbps if you are lucky.
What price streaming and on-demand then?
I see no point having the cost of a TV aerial or cable, decoder, TV licence, PVR (and scheduling hassle) or even a dedicated TV. Fixed schedule TV isn't worth it for the hassle and specialist cost.
Fibre to Cabinet internet (I often get over 50Mbps) and P2P can easily handle the bandwidth, that's why Bittorrent, including Popcorn time, are so successful.
ADSL is 20th century junk and BT should already have already moved on from F2C to Fibre to home to get rid of the last bit of speed crippling, twisted pair, copper cable and copper transceiver hardware.
"F2C to Fibre to home to get rid of the last bit of speed crippling, twisted pair, copper cable and copper transceiver hardware."
I take it you've never dealt with the highways agency / local council / landlords then?
The last could take you an eternity and cost thousands alone.
What we really need is the data comprising films and TV series hard encoded on some sort of marketable, portable medium. That means that it would be available at the whim of the purchaser for many years after they buy it (thereby enabling them to build a personal media library), is hardware backed up, might come in an attractive and imaginative container that would interest the purchaser and promote the media, can't vanish if the data provider discontinues the data, can offer the best quality of image and sound available and has room for additional material about the film or TV series.
This, of course, is technologically unfeasible and will never happen ...
I like your thinking however that would require me getting off my fat lardy arse and going to the shops at specific times of the day and only on specific days due to work commitments which everyone else has with the added risk of being dragged into clothes shops by the other half for hours of standing about and saying "That's nice", "No, it wouldn't make you look fat" and "Stop that man, he's trying to steal my wallet". Also I would guess this physical media would require space to store and sell it which would cost money increasing the price though without it one would assume much lower prices.
I don't think it would catch on to be honest.
Oh, I reckon it'd catch on. Though, for those less inclined to movement, a way for them to order said hard media from the comfort of their own homes, would probably be a revolutionary idea. They would avoid the drudgery of a rainy city centre and the hassle of footpads making off with wallets. Though, they'd need to be careful of virtual footpads making off with credit card numbers through dodgy machine mechanisms. I reckon shelving can be made in a variety of attractive materials and may even give rise to a modern day phenomenon - the (wo)man cave.
Though, I doubt you'll ever stop other halves complaining about large hips even though you dated them because you like her large hips, er, ahem.
> I like your thinking however that would require me getting off my fat lardy arse and going to the shops at specific times of the day and only on specific days
What? No Amazon over there?
I'm under a strict medical quarantine and I can still "shop until I drop" and I don't have to get up out of this here chair...
...and there's still the classic Netflix service too. Although procrastination becomes a problem.
Bandwidth.
Living in France, I have tried to use the Internet TV option of my ISP for two years. Last year, I gave up and reinstalled satellite.
The reason is that I live in a rural area, not a city, and my bandwidth is 10Mbps. Not shabby for surfing or online gaming, but ghastly when it comes to watching a 25fps TV show. The instances where I could watch an entire evening of TV without pixellation, tearing or the picture freezing while the sound continued for a few seconds can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
That is why I have steadfastly refused to subscribe to Canal+, despite their yearly efforts to incite me to. I'm not going to pay even more to watch the same pixellation, tearing and frame-freezing issues.
I suppose that, with at least double the bandwidth, the issues would mostly go away, and with a proper fiber link they should likely disappear entirely. However, the nearest fiber link is in the city 30km away, and there is no timetable on when it might happen to reach my door.
So, until that glorious day, I am staying on satellite.
My point ? I have a 10Mbps connection in a rural area. That is actually rather fast around here. I personally know quite a few people who are happy to have a 2Mbps connection. Of course, I know some who are on fiber (the bastards). In majority, though, rural areas simply don't have the bandwidth to enable Netflix.
So yeah, I'm not surprised. I shrug along with my compatriots.
Now, about those frog legs . . .
Rural broadband is rubbish in most parts of the world due to lack of population to make it economically viable. There are solutions, but it's going to take a long time to convince operators to sling fibre to every farmhouse.
The main cable operator over there Numericable offers 800Mbits and FTTH is now quite widely available in urban areas (and even a lot small-medium towns).
France certainly isn't short of bandwidth, in places where most people live anyway.
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