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The Canadian version of Netflix was their first foray into a pure-streaming version of their service, that is without the whole thing with mailing DVDs and so on. In a way, it may have been a test to see if a streaming-only service can be a success, even with a very limited selection of movies compared to its American counterpart, which culminated with this "Qwickster" atrocity. But then, it shows that the service's implementation is a kind of hasty hack, a bit the same way that the Canadian version of Amazon always lags behind the American one.

This has a direct effect on one feature I like using: your movie list. This is roughly the equivalent of an on-site bookmarking service for movies you might want to see later. It's quite convenient when you're browsing for a movie to watch and you actually find more than one, and it's easier to manage than using some list software on your computer or phone that you maintain yourself.

The problem with lists in Netflix is that it was hastily implemented based on the code of "movie queues" of the American version. In the American one, the queue was made to queue up DVDs you want to get by mail; each time you return a movie to Netflix, they will ship to you the next one in the queue. The fact that some movies in the queue are also available for streaming doesn't change its main purpose.

So, how do they deal with queues, I meant lists, for the Canadian service? Well, completely inconsistently. On some devices, like the "new" iPad interface, the Wii or the Samsung Smart Hub, lists are not available. Oddly, the Samsung player shows in the movie detailed information if the movie is part of your queue (it erroneously uses the word "queue"), but that's it. Worse, the iPad app used to support lists in past versions, and it was unceremoniously removed in the new "improved" version. I have to resort using my iPhone (until they remove that feature there too) to manage my list, which kind of sucks because manually searching for a movie was never great.

In short, Netflix' half-assed implementation of lists sucks. Coding-wise, it shouldn't be too difficult to implement, even if they redo it from scratch. But actively removing a feature from their players when it still is prominently displayed on their web site kind of show how low is that feature in their priority list. Honestly, if they are serious about international markets, they will have to clean up their act about not just content, but user experience.