In a desperate bid to curb your enthusiasm for bypassing hurdles like geoblocks and fifty shades of legal grey area in order to maintain your Netflix subscription, Foxtel have announced the soon-to-launch video-on-demand streaming service Presto, which sounds suspiciously a) the network’s pre-existing on-demand service, On Demand, and b) sort of futile.
According to IF, Foxtel subscribers willing to append a further $24.99 onto their monthly bill will be granted access to any title airing currently airing on Foxtel’s seven movie channels whenever they want, which basically equates to instant access to the fourteen movies you’ve already seen twice or didn’t want to watch in the first place because, really Foxtel, ‘Breaking Dawn Part II’ again?
It’s hoped Presto will lure the 70% of Australian households without Foxtel into a binding blood contract with the pay TV service, or will seduce an estimated 150,000 Australian Netflix subscribers away from the Internet streaming service, whose recent ventures in programming original content (House of Cards, Arrested Development) have not only received popular and critical acclaim but have experienced considerable delays in their broadcast here, primarily on Foxtel’s Showcase channel.
The entire first season of Orange Is The New Black, for example, was made available to Netflix’s 31 million US subscribers (and the 150,000 residing here) in bulk on July 11th for the monthly fee of $US7.99, or roughly $AUD12 (or so I’ve heard). The same series began playing out on Showcase in a slow-drip of weekly instalments (contrary to the Netflix binge-watching model) from October 9th at the minimum monthly cost of $87 to maintain access to Showcase.
IF continue that Foxtel are also rumoured to have made a direct plea to Netflix to cease accepting Australian credit card payments, which shouldn’t prove much of a problem for you, you adept Australian Netflix subscriber. If you can figure out how to change your VPN, you can almost certainly do anything in order to get your binge fix of niche dramatic programming.
via IF
