Finally got me some Netflix

I tried the one month trial of Netflix about one year ago when it launched in Finland. But decided to cancel because the device support was really bad. The main reason I wanted to get it was to have movies and shows for the kids to watch, and for my wife to watch from her computer. Getting Netflix to work on Linux machines back then was an incredible hack. We did have a Netflix client on the Wii, but there seemed to be no way to switch languages on it so all movies and shows where in finnish, and my kids don't know finnish. So that one didn't really work out too well.

I decided to try again, as I had heard that Netflix had added user profiles to their service. Also some really crafty people had made something called pipelight, a really nifty system that uses wine to install Silverlight seamlessly on Linux.

And indeed, the experience was totally different this time around. I easily got Netflix working in the browser, and after updating the Wii app, it also worked with the profiles. This meant that I could have the kids profile set to swedish, and my own to english. The languages don't always work, there seems to be some bugs to work out, and for some reason you can't turn off subtitles for some shows, you can only choose language. But I suspect this is just temporary bugs, Netflix hasn't operated that long in multi-lingual markets. And for some strange reason, the profiles are not supported in the android app.

All in all I have found the experience quite good, the biggest problem is probably the 2 stream limit on the 8€/month plan. I haven't had a chance to watch that much, because between my wife and the kids, the 2 streams are almost always in use.

As I see it the biggest use will probably be for kids programs, and random movie nights. For me it's usually fine to watch movies a few months later if it's more convenient. I don't know if I will actively follow series on Netflix, as they are usually a few years behind, but time will tell.