A Eulogy For EzyFlix From Someone Who Never Used EzyFlix

It's easy to think of streaming services in Australia as an invention that pretty much came along in the past 12 months or so, but the truth of the matter is that scrappy underdogs have been attempting to fill the Aussie SVOD void for years, with two major competitors emerging on the scene in the pre-Netflix era: Quickflix, founded in 2003(!), and EzyFlix.

While Quickflix has managed to beat the odds and remain a viable company in the wake of the arrival of not only Netflix but local contemporaries Stan and Presto, EzyFlix has not been so fortunate, with parent company Access Digital Entertainment quietly shuttering the business last week after a long battle with people not giving a shit about it.

In many ways, EzyFlix's fate seems a cruel twist — after all, the company was certainly doing its best to be flexible and innovative years before Foxtel bothered coming to the party, and had in fact amassed a content library that was significantly larger than those presently offered through Netflix, Stan or Presto. In fact, on paper, EzyFlix should have been an unprecedented success story; it was reasonably priced (from $3.99 to rent, from $8.99 to buy), sported about 2000 titles (or 6000 hours of content), had suppliers including Fox, Disney, Sony, NBC Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros and others, and even boasted an exclusive deal that saw them nab first-airing rights for a lot of films ahead of their general streaming periods, including movies like Guardians Of The Galaxy, Big Hero 6 and the third Hobbit movie. Before it boarded up the shop, it was easily on par with Quickflix's offerings.

So, where did it all go wrong?

Well, for starters, did you even know EzyFlix existed? If you did, you're probably also the sort of person that still enters raffles at the RSL in the genuine hopes of winning a meat tray, and the meat tray just happened to include a free trial card for EzyFlix that was accidentally stuck to the bottom of a sirloin, and rather than question how the card came to be on the underside of your steak in the first place, you just checked out EzyFlix because you trust your meat's opinions. Or maybe you just saw an ad for it on TV. That's possible too.

Having its existence acknowledged was clearly a hard-enough battle for EzyFlix, probably made even more difficult by the questionable decision to invoke the legacy of other failing/failed businesses (Video Ezy, EzyDVD) with its choice of prefix, a strangely limiting semantic choice that immediately locked the company into a late '90s/early '00s purgatory in terms of its aesthetic, the way Video 2000 really fucked itself beyond the turn of this century with its similarly shortsighted naming conventions. Of course, the suffix isn't much better, given that both Quickflix and Netflix would eventually step all over EzyFlix's stylistic balls, inadvertently tying all three companies together with an imaginary common ground that swiftly made both Quick and Ezy seem like the adopted siblings of the slicker, more-impressive Net, and people only paid attention to them out of sympathy and to avoid seeming rude in polite company.

At the base of it, though, the key point of difference between Quickflix's survival and EzyFlix's defeat in the face of rising competition arguably comes down to a fundamental financing decision: where Quickflix (and Netflix, Stan, Presto, and every other successful modern content provider) charges a regular subscription fee, EzyFlix took the video-store route of offering physical products (ie actual DVDs and Blu-ray discs) as well as digital pay-per-view, which meant that binge-watching was basically out of the picture for anyone but the fattest of cats. Now, knowing what we do about binge-watching — namely, that more and more people are using it to distract themselves from the crushing pointlessness of everyday modern life — it's hard to justify EzyFlix's decision to stick with a payment model made famous last century by sporting events, the least-binge-watchable of programming. Sure, it works for iTunes, but iTunes also charges far less per episode to rent and buy than EzyFlix did. Plus, Apple has billions of dollars to clean up any of its decision-making messes that might eventuate in the natural course of business, a luxury that EzyFlix did not enjoy. 

Ultimately, it's not like the company was inept, but despite having the equipment to jump the trench and storm the SVOD battlefield, EzyFlix has become the first casualty of the Australian streaming war — and, sadly, its mortal wounding seems to have been at least a little bit self-inflicted.