It’s one year since Netflix finally reached Ireland and the UK, and in the year that has passed the content available to Irish viewers on the streaming service has doubled while the service has gained more than 1m users.
In fact, Netflix UK & Ireland was adopted faster than Facebook and Twitter, reaching the 1m member milestone by July 2012.
Popular TV series like Breaking Bad, Blue Planet, Modern Family, Archer and Downton Abbey have been added over the course of the year, as well as feature films from 2012 and 2011, such as 21 Jump Street, The Woman in Black, Drive and The Iron Lady.
The service was added to new devices and platforms, becoming available on the Kindle Fire, the brand new Wii U, Windows Phone, Windows 8 and the Sony Entertainment Network – giving Bravia TV, Sony Blu-ray player and PlayStation 3 owners access to the service.
The service also saw many UI improvements and added functionality throughout the year, including updates to the web video player and upgrades to its mobile apps for Android and iOS.
Netflix even established its own content delivery network, Open Connect, in order to better serve customers worldwide.
Future plans
Netflix now has more than 30m members in 40 countries worldwide, streaming more than 1bn hours of video content per month. With Open Connect, it now plans to deliver super-HD and 3D content to viewers, and it has committed to providing captions on all content by 2014.
For 2013, Netflix UK & Ireland will receive hit feature films The Hunger Games, Thor, Magic Mike and Rango, and TV shows Gossip Girl, The Tudors, Fringe and Justified. There’s also more to come from Netflix Original Series, with all-new episodes of David Fincher’s House of Cards debuting on 1 February.
Another Netflix original series, Hemlock Grove, is due to arrive on 19 April. Eli Roth (director of Hostel) takes the role of executive producer of this 13-episode gothic thriller and also directs the first episode. It stars Famke Janssen and Bill Skarsgård (son of Stellan Skarsgård) and is based on a novel of the same name by Brian McGreevy, who is also involved in writing and producing the series.
