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Just the other day Netflix decided to bless all the people in the UK with access to their streaming services. Now lots of you are privy to pretty much the same services as we have been hearing and reading about from the US for some years. From what I can gather, the offerings from Netflix are quite solid, in both terms of pricing and available titles, not to mention how well the actual streaming works in real life conditions. Karl was streaming movies while out and about in London, all over 3G and it apparently worked really, really well.

While this was taking place, up here in the somewhat nippy northern parts of Europe, things are not quite as rosy and lovely. Amazon is to the common person on the street an unheard of company, Netflix is something people use in movies and tv-series and Lovefilm only recently started offering streaming. With a pretty abysmal selection of available titles, even in comparison to the DVDs they mail back and forth.

As you can see, the situation is not exactly great. Consider also that we have to travel in harsh winter conditions for a good portion of year when we want to rent movies, so it's even worse for us… Actually, I'm kidding. Things are not as gloomy as I made them out to be.

One of the options available for some time is the service Voddler, by the Swedish company bearing the same name. While having made some strange choices over the years, like making a desktop client completely void of mouse interaction, they have managed to improve considerably during 2011. Personally I prefer to stay away from watching movies on the desktop, simply because it depends on Adobe Flash and my old MacBook is not fond of that. The iOS apps are pretty good and do deliver a rather nice experience as far as it is possible on a mobile device. Library of movies is not too bad either, with new titles popping up at least as fast as they do in any rental place I have seen. The bad part is that there is no good way of sending the movie to the big screen, as Voddler does not have any interaction on for instance an Apple TV or any other media device that hooks up to your TV. Advantage: Netflix

Another option is the late-comer to the game in these parts; Apple! Yes, during 2011 they finally let us too join in on the joy of buying and renting movies via iTunes. The technology is far more integrated into existing options for getting the movie up on your TV, but only if you bought into the Apple ecosystem, of course. Here the real annoyance I have found is the somewhat slim offering of available titles. Could be that this is due to trouble getting all the various companies to sign on the dotted line or just that this region is not viewed as important in terms of making an effort to supply more titles. Prices are far from as bad as I have heard people say they are in other regions, compared to the alternatives there, but I'm not exactly impressed either. And there is no subscription service. Advantage: Netflix

Then there is the other Swedish service named Headweb, which offer roughly the same service as Voddler, sans the apps for Android, but there are apps for iOS. On the other hand, there is the option to use the service with your Playstation 3, which offers an alternative I have yet to see other companies have. Similar to Apple, Headweb does not use any kind of DRM on their wares anymore, but rather a form of digital watermarking that can be traced back to the buyer, should the file find its way to the general populace somehow. Gets titles about as fast as Voddler, but suffer from the same issue of not having quite the same library in the back as Netflix. Headweb does have some other interesting social interaction and awarding system built in, so at least there is that. Advantage: Netflix

So all in all, there are indeed a bunch of options available up here in the cold north known as Sweden. They just aren't up to the same level as Netflix, regardless of what way I choose to look at it. Granted, they are not necessarily bad and they do offer a compelling option to rolling out the door and moseying along to the nearest place where they let you borrow a plastic disc in exchange for some hard earned cash. I hope Amazon will crawl its way up here before long and give the existing companies a run for their collective money, as that would probably be needed right now. It's not bad as it is, but it can indeed get a fair bit better, at least in my mind!

Robert Falck

Robert is a freelance tech journalist from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on Bagel Tech and on his site streakmachine.com or you can follow him on twitter @streakmachine.

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Robert Falck

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