Just over 12 months ago, Australians could not view the third season of Kevin Spacey's salacious political thriller House of Cards without having to use a virtual private network or an illicit downloading site.
One year on and Netflix, the US video streaming giant that commissioned the show, has had a phenomenal impact on the Australian imagination since launching a local service on   March 24, 2015.
In a new survey of 2000 subscription TV users, seen exclusively by Fairfax Media, Netflix came top in a list of five pay-TV services - with five out of five stars - for "overall customer satisfaction", "value for money" and "ease of sign-up".
Netflix is estimated to have seduced more than 1 million Australians to pay between $8.99 and $11.99 a month for on-demand access to its originals, such as House of Cards and Making a Murderer, and its library of acquired movies and shows. 
"It seems that everyone has been talking about Netflix over the last 12 months - if you don't have the service yourself, you probably know someone who does," says head of Canstar Blue, Megan Doyle.
"There's definitely a bit of halo effect with Netflix," she says of the survey results. "I'm a bit surprised it performed so well in terms of value for money but it seems it can't do anything wrong. Its branding is amazing."
The Australian brand with the most to lose from the Netflix phenomenon is widely seen to be Foxtel, which is owned by Telstra and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Its survey results were markedly different.
  Exclusive HBO content  
Foxtel, which boasts large amounts of local content such as Wentworth and The Real Housewives of Melbourne and exclusive US content from HBO, with rights to the immensely popular Game of Thrones, topped Canstar Blue's survey for "range of content" and "availability of new releases" with five stars for each.
That is perhaps little surprise when you also consider that the lion's share of Foxtel subscribers take its sports packages, seen as essential by most sports nuts, particularly fans of the NRL and the AFL (many games of both codes are also shown on Channel Nine and Channel Seven).
But despite all of that, in terms of "value for money" and "overall satisfaction", Foxtel came a poor joint third, with just three out of five stars.
And that's where the company, which wants to deepen its "penetration" of Australian households beyond 30 per cent, has a problem.
Customers pay between $26 and $135 a month to subscribe to Foxtel, which has one of the highest average revenues per customer of any cable company in the world.
A basic $26 Foxtel package offers a plethora of live channels, none of which you can get on so-called subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services such as Netflix, but even the Foxtel basic service costs significantly more than an SVOD service.
The rise of "on-demand" viewing also means more people want to watch what they want when they want, without necessarily paying for dozens of channels they may rarely watch, if ever.
  On-demand library  
Foxtel's new advertising campaign plays up the fact that, far from being just a linear service, it has a bulging on-demand library - and its executives are busy trying to beef up that library by locking in rights to all series of its key shows.
But that significant price differential with SVOD is causing some long-standing customers to question how much they pay for their Foxtel subscriptions.
In the US, where the SVOD market is more developed, there has been evidence of so-called "cord shaving" - customers reducing their cable subscriptions, and taking up SVOD for drama and movies in particular.
It's earlier days in Australia, and so far Foxtel has defied the doomsayers. It has grown subscribers and revenues, albeit at the expense of profits, since it almost halved the price of basic Foxtel in late 2014.
"In the first half of this financial year, just after the new SVOD services launched, Foxtel grew its customer base by 8.1 per cent compared to the same period in the previous year," a spokesman says.
That 8.1 per cent included subscribers to its broadband service and Presto, Foxtel's own SVOD service (which performed poorly in Canstar Blue's survey).
But Foxtel also says its cable and satellite customers grew by 7.4 per cent and "churn" - the percentage of customers leaving - declined from 11.4 per cent to 10.2 per cent, a record low.
  First-run content  
"These are the best measures of customer satisfaction with our service. Foxtel is a different business to the new SVOD players, they do not offer any sport, they have significantly less premium, first-run content and they do not invest in significant amounts of Australian programming," a Foxtel spokesman said.
One SVOD player investing some money into local content is Stan, which is seeking to differentiate itself from Netflix with its global US-produced slate. Its small slate of originals includes the comedy No Activity and a forthcoming series spin-off of psychological thriller-drama Wolf Creek.
Stan, which is owned by Nine Entertainment Co and Fairfax Media, owner of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review, has also secured exclusive rights to much of CBS's Showtime slate, including the return of 1990s hit series Twin Peaks, keeping it, and all other new Showtime shows, off rival services including Foxtel.
Stan came second, ahead of Foxtel, on both "value for money" and "overall satisfaction", in Canstar Blue's survey.
Like Netflix, Stan, whose other acquired shows include Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, offers the first month free. It then charges $10 and carries no ads, as with all SVOD services (Foxtel's increased ad volumes have been a cause of irritation for some customers).
It is difficult to predict the long-term impact of SVOD on Foxtel not least because question marks remain over how sustainable the SVOD business model will ultimately prove.
But with NBC Universal launching its own reality-TV SVOD service, and Disney considering a launch of its own, there is no end to the rising competition facing the cable guys right now.
  Apple-TV style  
Foxtel is already considering radical changes, including, as revealed by Fairfax Media last week, putting Netflix on its forthcoming Apple TV-style streaming device in what would be a dramatic shift from its traditional "walled-garden" approach to content. 

 All of this dizzying change adds to the ceiling-high in-tray of Foxtel's incoming chief executive Peter Tonagh, who is replacing the boss of five years Richard Freudenstein. The incumbent pay-TV provider changed its chief executive in   March as part of arguably the biggest shake-up in its 21-year history.
As revealed by Fairfax Media, News and Telstra are also hoping to merge Foxtel with News' Fox Sports before an $8 billion sharemarket float, which will involve Telstra selling most of its stake in a combined business, in the second half of 2016.
On the one hand, selling the Foxtel story to investors should be easy: it boasts $1 billion in annual profits - more than all of the commercial free-to-air networks put together - and about 2.7 million cable and satellite customers.
But investors always look to the future, and there's plenty to be unsure about.
Foxtel's loss of the English Premier League right to telco Optus - which will show games via the internet rather than cable or satellite - was yet another sign that technology disruption is spoiling what was once a game of Monopoly for its twin shareholders, Telstra and News Corp.
For its part, News Corp plans to raise its stake in Foxtel to 51 per cent if a sharemarket float goes ahead. Some in the industry believe News will go further and exercise its right to buy all of Telstra's stake, taking 100 per cent control, thus doubling down on Foxtel and keeping it from the inconvenient scrutiny of outside investors.
But whatever eventuates from News' talks with Telstra, there is no doubt that the Murdochs have proved their naysayers wrong many times before - and that has been thanks, in part, to a visceral instinct for what customers actually want.
News can (and will) point to the success of its British pay-TV business Sky, whose shares have almost doubled in the past five years (helped by the growth of its broadband service), as a case in point, if Foxtel is floated.
But if Canstar Blue's survey is accurate, News has a difficult problem with some of its customers in Australia, who think its pay-TV service should be more satisfying overall, and better value for money.
Changing that perception will not be easy.