While us Yanks get to enjoy streaming a wide variety of crap on Netflix, our friends to the North have been subjected to a much more limited selection of crap. They don’t even have access to DVDs or Blu-rays in the mail! Being a Netflix subscriber in Canada is definitely a harder sell than in the States.
So hopefully the news that Netflix now has access to over 350 Paramount films will cheer up you Canucks. For the next five years, Canadian subscribers will have access to a large portion of Paramount’s catalogue, including The African Queen, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Defiance, Iron Man 2, Sabrina, Terms of Endearment, Titanic, Wayne’s World, and Zoolander, all of which were name dropped in the press release. It’s worth noting that only a few of the listed films are available for streaming in the US, so Canada currently has streaming exclusives on a lot of films Americans would likely want to watch.
Netflix has more than just streaming rights, though. They also maintain exclusive subscription television rights for all first-run films by Paramount, giving them the ability to hold something over the heads of those pesky cable/internet companies they’ve been fighting with over bandwith costs and rival content.
I’m sure not every film in this deal will be a winner, as The Last Airbender is another film that the press release “brags” about, but maybe these new additions will start to make up for the rest of Canadian Netflix’s horrible selection, eh?
[via Engadget]
