When streaming service Stan was announced last November, it was said to be launching in early 2015. We now have a date for the launch — January 26.
Stan’s launch comes just weeks after Foxtel launched its similar Presto service. At $10 a month for both movies and TV, it looks slightly better value than Presto, which charges $14.95 for both TV and movies, or $9.95 for a TV-only or movie-only version.
The rush to market by both services is heavily influenced by the imminent arrival of dominant streaming service Netflix, which will launch in Australia before the end of March. Netflix hasn’t announced local pricing, but it seems likely that it will also come in around $10.
We’ll have a full comparison between Presto, Stan and Quickflix next week.
Disclosure: Stan is a joint venture between Nine and Fairfax. Fairfax owns Allure Media, which publishes Lifehacker.
Comments
13 responses to “Stan TV And Movie Streaming Launches Next Week (Ahead Of Netflix)”
Until Internet providers start putting these services in the “exempted data” section like iview.
Its not going to work for mass market.
I agree but it doesn’t seem likely when most of Australia’s biggest ISP’s offer their own TV and Movie services.
And the Stan android app detects ‘modified’ system and refuses to run, just because my bootloader is unlocked…
Why would they care about that?
As much as it sucks my assumption would be that modded devices might be in some way able to bypass security measures to record the video stream of access their service through some other means. I can understand why they do it but it’s still a pain in the ass.
It would be exactly this, though it seems stupid to try and block it on a phone when recording would be much easier on a PC and I doubt they’ve put similar security measures in place to stop that.
My thoughts exactly, so much easier to capture on PC than Android.
Look into Xposed for Android, from memory there is a module that spoofs any attempt at checking whether your system is “modified” etc… has been used by people with banking apps that don’t like empowered Android users, lol
Yeah I know, I just ended up side loading the app onto my phone instead.
Thanks for that, Xposed with the Rootcloak module worked perfectly on my S3 running Omni Rom.
I’ve been using this on their “Early Access” program. So far the content seems reasonable, it’s the technology that’s letting it down…
The Silverlight playing on PC is hopeless, stutters, slow, limited features. the fact they actually launched, in 2015, with it, worries me, it doesn’t bode well for the technical competence if that’s what they decided to go with…
The Android app doesn’t run on rooted phones, so that’s useless. You can hide the fact your phone is rooted with RootCloak, but that really only work in 4.3/4,4, so no upgrading to Lollipop if you’re wanting to use Stan…. (And keep your fingers cross that they don’t work around rootcloak)
The don’t have a PS3 or Xbox 360 app, so combined with the Android app issues, means I can’t actually watch this on my TV.
I can see what they’re trying to do here. They’re taking the lean/agile approach, and launching with a minimal set of features. They will (obviously) add more later on. the problem is their competition already has all these features and bugs sorted. It would have been better for them to just wait a few more weeks and sort out the lack of Console apps, fix up the root/jailbreak issues on mobile, and refine their Silverlight player (or better yet, ditch it entirely, but that’s probably a bit more than a few weeks work!).
All this will do is leave a sour taste in early adopters mouths, and cause their recommendations to be negative because of this. This would have been impressive 4/5 years ago, when Netflix was in it’s infancy, but today, people know what’s possible, and they’ll just go somewhere else.
Got my invitation the other day. I was expecting the content to be low, but I’m not a fan of Silverlight, and their idea of high def is just ridiculous..! I have big pipes so why the hell do I need crippled download speeds..?
You know why they went with Silverlight don’t you ? Just that little bit harder to ‘rip’ silverlight streams than FLV. Any half-arsed ‘youtube recorder’ will rip FLV streams, whereas Silverlight needs a decent one. At least that was the case I when I tried tracking down a ripper for MSN (Fixplay) video a fair few years ago now (i.e. when they launched it and had a decent content offering, before it got crippled). Ended up having to buy Jaksta to do it …
You know what would be a useful ‘real world’ inclusion in the ‘comparison’ article ?
Top 5 Movie & TV Torrents on your favourite private tracker of choice, vs availability (or lack thereof) on Presto, Stan and … Quickflix is it (or was that meant to read Netflix – not sure if they’ve given ‘press’ access to ‘preview’ / staging for the AU site yet) ?
At the end of the day that’s what all these services will be competing against.
I agree – I joined Stan this month and have consumed our 200gb data with heavy daily usage of Stan …