Reed Hastings is confident of Netflix’s global success, but admits there will be big hurdles. Source: Supplied
AS IT looks to expand globally, Netflix’s CEO has spoken about how it plans to make international flavours of the service as strong as the United States’ and what he believes the standard of internet needs to be.
Speaking at Netflix’s Q4 earnings results call, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings confirmed his company’s intentions to snap up global rights to TV shows, rather than on a country by country basis.
“[We] had the vision to start to figure out how to get global rights for some of the content by moving up the food chain,” Hastings said.
“And we have been pushing on that dimension, where we can get the global rights and we don’t have to go country by country across 200 countries, but instead can provide the producer upfront money, guaranteed money, and get great access.”
By doing this, Netflix hopes to end people using VPNs and DNS spoofing methods to access the US site in areas like Australia by giving everyone the same content.
It’s not clear how many Australians currently use a backdoor method to access the service, with some believing it is up to 200,000.
A Netflix spokesman told news.com.authat they currently don’t block Australian credit cards in case they are being used by Aussies living in the USA.
Netflix will launch in Australia in March, with what will initially be a lacklustre line-up, missing key shows like Orange is the New Black and Better Call Saul which Foxtel’s Presto and Fairfax/Nine owned Stan have the rights to respectively.
Netflix commissioned “Orange is the New Black” won’t be available at launch. Source: Supplied
Away from Netflix specifically, Hastings had some bad news for Aussies, claiming that he believes that when it comes to internet speed “25Mbps is kind of a baseline for the next five years, as opposed to the last five years.”
That’s the same speed that Malcolm Turnbull is promising to deliver as part of the new multi-technology NBN rollout.
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