2011 30
Netflix to launch in Spain
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Probably the fact that Spain is the country with more downloads per internet user in Europe made Spain the first EU country to get Netflix. When I recently met with Presidential hopeful Alfredo Rubalcaba he spoke about how much pressure the Spanish government received to stop the downloading of US content without pay in Spain and was very aware of how Spotify was making it in Spain as a legal alternative.
Now the challenge will be to see if it was true that people downloaded because DVDs are a rip off or because they don’t want to pay any price for movies. Because Spotify really took off in Spain but only the ad based version. Few pay. And there is no ad version of Netflix. Only on Hulu there is. But to me Netflix is an incredible deal. To pay less than €10 per month for all you can eat quality streamed movies is unbelievable.
I pay for Spotify and for Netflix. Netflix I had to sign up through our home in NYC and use it with VPN service Witopia that makes me show up as a US client.
I love Spotify on my mobile!
I thought that you could not download rare movies with Vuze, that Bittorrent clients were for very popular movies. But I was wrong. You can actually download movies even if the torrent has, say 5 seeds. So these are the films I downloaded (in Spain we pay a tax on storage media and it is legal to download movies for personal consumption).
Amreeka, Revanche, Seraphine, Shake Hands with the Devil, Chidren of Heaven,Eastern,The Sweet Herafter,The Messenger,Food Inc,La Meglio Gioventu,Secretary,Afghan Star and Crazy Heart.
All these films were recommended to me by Netflix. The paradox is that I pay my monthly Netflix fee but Netflix does not allow me to stream these movies in Spain. So I use Netflix recommendation engine to know what I will like (Netflix is 90% accurate with my unusual taste for movies) and I complement it with free downloads from Vuze. I am also paying Witopia to show me with a US IP but it works with Pandora, Hulu, HBO and not anymore with Netflix.