If you haven’t figured it out yet, I watch a lot of TV shows, rarely on TV itself though. I outgrew scheduled television maybe more than a decade ago. I’m reminded of this because I was going through some old disks and found burned episodes of stuff like Smallville, Heroes, The Simpsons, various anime, and so on.
Those were from the days before streaming though. These days an abundance of content is available online via the streaming services, no need to store all those episodes yourself.
I first tried out Netflix during my three-month London stint back in 2015 (which I now realized I never wrote about). Netflix wasn’t available in the PH yet, so I took the opportunity to take a free month trial which led to binge watching of shows like House and The Office when I had the opportunity to work from home.
A few months after I got back from the trip, Netflix became available in the PH, January 2016! I initially figured it might not be feasible at all given how terrible the internet here was, but it performed well enough even with our old 4Mbps BayanDSL. The content library was as expected, a lot smaller than the US one was, but it was a pretty good start. It meant a lot of the Netflix original content, including the Marvel shows, were available to me on demand so it was great.
Some people like to use a VPN so they get access to a larger library, but I haven’t tried that. Honestly, there is already so much content in Netflix PH anyway, and if there’s any non Netflix content I wanted to watch, there are other ways rather than a VPN. (The old ways still worked of course.)
Today, Netflix is a staple in our household, even my nontechie dad uses it a lot, thanks to the LG smart tv we bought a while back. And the kids section helps entertain the nieces and nephews whenever they’re over. For me personally, aside from the old movies and shows I’m happy with a lot of the standup content and original shows. I think even with the limited content library, Netflix PH is still pretty good value.
Not content with Netflix though, I also subbed to Amazon Prime around six months back. Well, back then my primary goal was to get Twitch Prime in order to get some Eternal loot (LOL), Amazon Prime was a nice bonus. I haven’t used it too much though. I’ve seen the new Jack Ryan series, it was pretty good. I’ve also watched a few old movies there, and they have a bunch of comedy series I like such as Community, The Office, Parks, etc. I’m coming up on six months for my sub though, which means I’m about to lose the discounted new subscriber rate. I don’t use Amazon Prime nearly as often as I do Netflix, so I’m not yet sure whether I should keep it around.
There’s definitely still a lot of holes in the streaming content available locally though - we don’t have Hulu for one thing. And the new services like DC Universe and Disney+ probably won’t be available here for a while. I’m hoping those companies choose to have Netflix distribute internationally in the meantime. For the regular network shows like the Arrowverse shows, I still have to use traditional less legal methods to keep up weekly. Hopefully we’re moving towards a future where international viewers have the same legal streaming options available as the Western world does.
(I really should cut down on my TV shows though…)
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