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Netflix is sort of, kind of, maybe coming to South Africa

Netflix is undoubtedly the king when it comes to video-on-demand (VOD) services, with over 50 million subscribers across the world. South Africans have been waiting with bated breath to find out when the service will arrive here – and they might just get their wish.

The company announced yesterday that it plans to expand into more than 200 territories in the coming years, and while it didn’t give specific details, MyBroadband did manage to extract some confirmation from a Netflix representative regarding South Africa.

“We have not provided details of when we plan to go where, but you can be confident South Africa is among the countries we intend to serve sometime in the next two years,” it apparently said.

Saying that it intends to serve SA in the next two years is very different from concretely confirming that the service is definitely coming to our shores.

Netflix also needs to do something in order to combat the huge amount of viewers who make use of the video streaming facility through VPN or DNS services. A British online-research firm conducted a survey late last year, and concluded that as many as 21.6 million users in China make use of Netflix – a huge amount of people that have to go through a VPN, essentially making their Netflix’s subscriptions illegal.

If the VOD company wants to turn “illegal” users in legal ones, it has to expand into new territories, which should convert already-paying customers.

Then there is the content: the US Netflix is incredibly good at producing original content, recently announcing that it will be streaming The Interview later this month. Controversial.

South Africa is a bit of a different story, as Multichoice has a firm grip on most of the broadcasting licenses for international programming. Only time will tell if South Africa will get an extremely watered-down version of Netflix, or if we will be able to plug in directly to the US service.

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