After announcing the expansion last October, Netflix has finally pulled the trigger and launched its service in the U.K. and Ireland today.

According to a blog post, the service will work just like the North American service – a once-a-month subscription fee. As would be expected, new users are being offered a one-month free trial, and after that it will cost subscribers £5.99 in the U.K. ($9.24) and €6.99 in Ireland ($8.88).

With this move, Netflix will attempt to expand the already impressive reach of their streaming service. Last week the company announced that some 20 million subscribers had streamed over 2 billion hours of content in Q4. That’s over 100 hours of content per person during the period.

Netflix’s biggest rival across the pond will be Lovefilm, the Netflix-like European company that was acquired by Amazon in January of 2011. Amazon just singed a multi-year agreement with Sony as well as deals with the BBC and ITV in order to expand the Lovefilm catalog.

Netflix’s move to UK and Ireland will come with Facebook integration, or “social driven suggestions.” That partnership is still struggling to get off the ground in the States, due to some decades-old privacy laws. However, the initiative cleared a major hurdle in December as the House passed a bill that would allow the integration to continue.