news Australian movie and TV streaming company Quickflix yesterday announced the beginning of what it believes to be “a new-era in affordable home entertainment” with the launch of its new subscription options to its IPTV service, including streaming of TV shows and movies for only $9.99 per month.
According to a statement issued by the company yesterday, Quickflix’s Australian customers can now enjoy unlimited streaming of selected TV shows including those from US premium network HBO and the UK’s BBC as well as blockbuster movies from Hollywood and Kids TV in standard definition (SD) or high definition (HD) for one low monthly fee of $9.99. The network says this makes its offering “by far the most affordable service of its kind”.
Under the $9.99 per month subscription, customers have the flexibility of streaming to up to six registered devices including “a wide array” of smart TVs, game consoles, Blu-ray players, mobiles, tablets, PCs and other devices. Under the one subscription a family or household is eligible to stream up to three movies or TV shows concurrently. Streaming of premium latest release movies pay-per-view and current and recent seasons TV pay-per-episode or season pass is also available for an additional charge.
Quickflix has also announced a new entry-level subscription plan for its online DVD rental postal service of $12.99 per month for one DVD (includes Blu-ray) out-at-a-time with no limit on the number of times a DVD is exchanged in the month.
Quickflix Founder and CEO, Stephen Langsford, said: “We believe our new entry level streaming plan of $9.99 per month offers customers the best value proposition and provides unparalleled choice and convenience compared with Foxtel’s $19.99 per month plan which only includes standard definition movies and is limited to PC, Mac and iPads.”
“What customers want is streaming to their TV screen and their mobile devices. Our streaming service does both and is growing at pace with well over 7.5 million movies and TV shows streamed to date and the numbers of hours streamed on Quickflix growing by about 20 per cent per quarter.
“We’re pricing our subscription streaming service at only $9.99 per month so customers won’t even have to think twice about the price. We think all the great content we offer for the family at about half of what it costs to go to the cinema for a single ticket or half of Foxtel’s Presto service is irresistible.”
“Quickflix is about making watching movie and TV shows more enjoyable. Our online DVD rental service did away with video store late fees. Our streaming service has done away with the need for a set top box and committing to long-term contracts. We’re also committed to continuing to expand our range of latest release movies and hit TV series from the major networks and studios and we’ll be launching more great content over the weeks and months ahead.”
According to the company, Quickflix’s online DVD rental service offers access to Australia’s largest range of latest release and catalogue movies and TV shows, over 60,000 DVD and Blu-ray titles in total. The three new DVD and Blu-ray subscription plans of one, two or three discs out-at-a-time with unlimited exchanges and postage paid are priced at $12.99, $22.99 and $29.99 per month respectively or combined with streaming for only $19.99, $29.99 and $39.99 per month respectively, a saving of $2.99 per month.
opinion/analysis
$9.99 per month for unlimited access to Quickflix’s IPTV streaming service? I do believe I will be signing up to that immediately, at least as a test run. It’ll go nicely alongside the similarly small fees I pay for access to other IPTV services such as Crunchyroll for anime. I’ve been a long-time subscriber to Quickflix’s DVD rental service (although not over the past several months), and so I know the company is pretty reliable. I haven’t given its IPTV offering a try for a while, but at this price point it does very much feel like an impulse purchase. Perhaps time for a review on Delimiter as well.
In terms of wider analysis, this clearly looks like a land grab to try and lock in IPTV subscribers ahead of Foxtel’s recent launches in Australia of on-demand IPTV movies and TV options. Personally I feel as though neither party is really going to take off too heavily just yet though; I suspect it will take a major player such as Netflix launching in Australia to get that mainstream acceptance coming through; and perhaps some more broadband infrastructure upgrades.
Image credit: Quickflix
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What is the quality (SD HD) of the content like?
I have no interest in lower than 720p content it is just not worth it
I’ll test and report back.
not quite on a related topic, but if you are looking into it…. not having used such a service outside of abc/sbs services, will these offer subtitling for the hard of hearing? (and does Crunchyroll?)
Up-to-date Game of Thrones? Nope.
Up-to-date Vikings? Nope.
Native Apple TV client? Nope.
Can I airplay from my iPhone or iPad to my Apple TV? Nope.
1080p? Nope.
This horse and his credit card bolted long ago. You are going to have to come up with something pretty bloody special to bring me back into the yard.
Arrrrrrrrr!
1080P??
The problem with these streaming services is that the vast majority of connections in Australian homes aren’t suitable for streaming HD content. SD content would stream fine to most homes but HD would be starting to push the boundaries. This is the whole issue with the FTTN crap and why MT is rolling this out for Uncle Rupert. It hinders any possible potential for competition to enter Aussie markets and offer real IPTV competition.
I don’t understand the whining and whinging here because here we have Quickflix offering a service at a very, very competitive price point. At the present time you may not be able to have all your cake and eat it too but at least it’s a step in the right direction as far as pricing goes. We all whined about the price of Foxtel and Quickflix release something like this and we still have negativity.
As for Game Of Thrones (the latest) shall they do a bidding war with Rupert lol.
5mbps for netflix HD. While I oppose FTTN, we need to be realistic in our arguments against it.
http://www.soundandvision.com/content/how-much-bandwidth-do-you-need-streaming-video
“Vudu
Note: All Vudu movies are streamed with Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio.
1.0 – 2.3 Mbps for SD video
2.3 – 4.5 Mbps for 720p video
4.5 – 9.0 Mbps for HDX 1080p video
Over 9 Mbps for 3D HD movies”
Resolution != Quality
There’s a reason Blu-rays (which are highly compressed) have a stream rate of 48Mbps. To be fair I find Netflix HD pretty good although it rarely streams higher than 720p, but I expect that’s more to do with the content not being hosted locally rather than my 7Mbps bandwidth not being up to handling more. Anyway, with fibre we’d be able to stream Blu-ray quality HD and we’d need 200Mbps to stream Blu-ray equivalent compression 4K.
Star Trek: Nope
Stargate: Nope
Doctor Who: barely (only s1-5 of the reboot, nothing older)
Didn’t bother continuing after that.
Yeah it’s pretty lame , Walking Dead season 3 still $43 to stream/own and Spartacus not much cheaper.
That’s a shame. I just recently finished watching Stargate SG-1 using Amazon Prime’s Instant TV. Was hoping with this news that Australian offerings would be catching up but I guess not.
Bummer.
Does the $9.99 include the movies listed as pay-per-play?
If not seems a bit spensive.
Confused.
Edit so you pay for the newer releases. Not totally unreasonable, I guess.
From the QuickFlix FAQs:
“Pay Per Play and Pay To Own titles are not included in a Quickflix Subscription. You will be able to purchase these seperately. Prices are as marked upon selecting the title.”
Does it have a minimum download speed limit you need?
Like iinet FetchTV @ 3.5mbs
so charge way more for way less content. And they wonder why Legal Content that is available in Australia isn’t being used much.
On the other hand with a DNS redirector and an Aus post prepaid credit card I can access 10X the content for the same price and its more up to date and has movies as well.
Wake me up when IPTV in Australia gets real.
I had a free 3 month $15 subscription through PlayStation & just cancelled it. I was only getting about 3 DVD’s a Month due to postage times & i watched 2 free streamed movies in that 3 months. Not much to choose from that was worth watching online & I only received older movies in the post, never a new release.
Not much value there for me, cheaper to rent them locally.
Having said that, now they’ve dropped it by a couple of $’s it makes a bit more sense.
I’ve had QuickFlix trials a couple of times. Due to being in WA it takes 7 days to turnaround a film – I was returning them the same afternoon they arrived and immediately notifying them using my account tool and that’s the fastest I could get it. I also found the availability of new releases to be abysmal.
IP streaming for a reasonable cost is a great idea, but it’s of no value if there is no content people actually want.
As for physical discs, I’ll keep renting from my local video store for the foreseeable future, thanks.
I trialled Quickflix a couple of months ago when it was $14.95 and frankly I couldnt find a single thing I wanted to watch that didnt cost me more money on top of the $14.95 monthly fee and statements like this:
According to a statement issued by the company yesterday, Quickflix’s Australian customers can now enjoy unlimited streaming of selected TV shows including those from US premium network HBO and the UK’s BBC as well as blockbuster movies from Hollywood and Kids TV in standard definition (SD) or high definition (HD) for one low monthly fee of $9.99. The network says this makes its offering “by far the most affordable service of its kind”.
tell’s me not much has changed.
It’s a shame as the service worked really well on my TiVo’s and Xbox 360’s. I would actually pay the old price $14.95 if it was 100% all you can eat like NetFlix currently is. 🙁
Roku / WDTV / AppleTV / Samsung TV apps to go with it?
Without the support of those smart streaming devices I don’t think it’s going to grab much ground 🙁
7
if you want to see the quality, try the movie ‘1941’ – some scenes are of Japanese sailors talking. the movie itself has subtitles, quickflix crappy rip does not. I had quickflix for free and it still wasn’t worth it.
Tried Quickflix a couple of years ago when they started. I sent back a DVD which appears to have gotten lost in the mail. They changed me full replacement cost. Never again. I’ll stick with Netflix and a US DNS server.
I’m currently trialing the Quickflix service and for $9.95 you get a limited catalogue of old movies that stream in relatively poor SD quality. Watching a movie from a paid service, pixelation and colour banding is not acceptable. Unfortunately the quality of the content is lower than that which can be obtained by piracy. Not just pirated HD content, but even SD content. For any new release movie it costs an extra $5.99 to watch it over 48 hours. This price is exuberant and unfortunately I don’t want to try to see if the quality is better any than the rest of the content because I don’t want to potentially spend $6 for a low grade product.
The Hoyts Kiosk down the road is doing new release for $3 and any other movie for $1. Unfortunately it’s so popular it’s hard to get the movie you want. The local video store has closed down and so here I am stuck trying to work out how to legally obtain movies in HD quality without breaking the bank. The Quickflix postal service seems ok, though so far I haven’t been sent a movie on the few in my queue I really want to watch.
This service will allow the market for IPTV to hit mainstream in Australia.
The small 10% of the market that want 1080p versions of GoT (high-res boobies!) and unlimited access to Buffy, Angel, Doctor Who, Firefly, Stargate SG-1, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, The Big Bang Theory, etc., will continue to do what they’ve always done: Torrent it until a viable market alternative meets our needs.
I already have Netflix, which costs me (including ‘unblock-us’) about $15 a month and it works on every single device that I own. Quickflix, does not.
I used to use Quickflix ten years ago when they were a postal-DVD service, and their selection back then was pretty sub-par, as is their current streaming catalogue. I think I might give this mob a miss for a couple of more years until they compete with Netflix and Hulu. (nothing will ever compete with Torrents, even if price isn’t taken as a factor)
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