Quickflix

» see quickflix.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

quickflix was australia-only at the catalog and postage layer, which is another way of saying it was never going to reach me. a dvd-by-mail service leans on a local postal network and a local licensing deal. neither of those crossed into turkey, and neither did the streaming service that grew out of it.

it started in perth in 2003, a mail-order disc-rental business modeled on early netflix. bill keech and stephen langsford were among the founders. in october 2011 it launched streaming and became the first real movie-streaming service most australians could get their hands on, years before netflix showed up locally. for a stretch it was the whole market.

netflix landed in australia in march 2015 and the gap closed fast. quickflix had a smaller catalog and a weaker balance sheet, and it could not match a global company's licensing budget. the company went into voluntary administration in april 2016. a us investor bought the streaming and disc business for about one and a half million australian dollars and kept it limping. it never recovered, and a court wound quickflix up for good in september 2021. even netflix was a late arrival in turkey, so a local dvd rival on the other side of the world was never once part of the picture here.

~ the case file ~

~ the streaming wars ~

2016 was a bad year for australian streaming that was not netflix. presto, the local joint venture, announced it would close the same week quickflix got sold off. the pattern was the same one that played out everywhere. a homegrown service builds the habit, a global one walks in with a deeper catalog and more cash, and the local option gets bought for scrap or shut down.

~ the long tail ~

the new owner could not turn it around. quickflix delisted from the australian exchange in 2017 and spent its last years as a shell winding down, the streaming lights dimming long before the paperwork caught up. when the court order finally came in september 2021 it was closing a company that had already stopped mattering. by then australians were on netflix and stan like everyone else.

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