It's on, at last. As of midnight last night you could get Netflix in Australia. A cramped, constrained version of the much larger, more generous US Netflix to be sure, but the journey of a thousand miles begins right after I binge-watch Firefly and House of Cards, oh, and Breaking Bad over on Stan, and all the many, many eps of Dr Who I missed and Torchwood and maybe John Dies at the End.

The launch day content for on-demand video, like the launch day titles for a new gaming console, will always seem a little underwhelming. Services like Netflix and Stan (the joint venture between Fairfax, the publishers of this site, and the Nine Network) have to inch their way through the minefields and barbed wire of licensing deals from an age before a global media marketplace, before we thought ourselves entitled to watch whatever the hell we wanted, right now goddamnit. Watching Stan's catalogue grow every week, sometimes every day since I gave them my credit card, has offered assurance that the vast amounts of time are just waiting to be wasted in front of the teev, or iPad or screen of my choice in the very near future.

My stack o' shame is already high, built of boxed sets of TV series on DVD I haven't yet finished or even started watching. The Sopranos. 30 Rock. Generation Kill. Parks and Rec. Justified. 24. Madmen. Sherlock. Because of this, I'm not much concerned by "thin" lists of launch day titles. All the streaming services will grow and it's not physically possible to watch everything they offer. Probably not even to watch everything you'd like, unless you took a year off.

Foxtel will be wetting the bed this morning. They do have their own Netflix-like streaming service, Presto, a standard-def only offering, for 10 bucks a month, but they'd really really prefer their previously captive audience keep paying them a hundred plus dollars a month for a hundred plus channels of utter crap.

This is why HBO's deal with Apple in the US, and only in the US so far, is so important. There the Game of Thrones producer (and home of The Sopranos, Deadwood, Sex and the City and most of the best TV of the last decade or so) will this year offer to sell its content directly to viewers. Apple negotiated that exclusive deal for themselves but only for the first three months. After that Americans who want their HBO shows but don't have a pay TV subscription, can still have them. Directly from HBO.

It's the future, the very near future. And it's gonna be a hell of lot better than the rubbish deal viewers were offered in the past. 

But it won't be perfect. If you subscribed to everything, you could end up paying even more than you do now, certainly for a basic pay TV package. Possibly even more than the price of Foxtel's "premium" services. 

Will people pay? Will you? I will, because I make my living off intellectual property and could not live with the hypocrisy of stealing other people's work. But Australians are renowned pirates of TV shows and movies, and Queenslanders in particular are reluctant to pay their way. I was shown some research this morning about the willingness of consumers to pay for TV content and Queenslanders were significant outliers. Only West Australians could challenge them for their reluctance to pay for the shows they watch.

Nobody is quite sure why. Perhaps we are especially discerning customers, put off by years of being fed overpriced garbage by the incumbent pay TV operator. Perhaps we just like to spend more time out of doors? It's a genuine mystery that all of the streaming operators are nutting over.

But, if you'll excuse me, I have some TV to catch up on.