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There have been lots of surprises at CES (Computer Electronics Show) 2016 since the show officially began on Wednesday January 6th 2016.

But nothing quite compares to the announcement by CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings on Wednesday January 6th 2016 that they’re expanding to some 130 additional countries. This news was a bit shocking even to me; I’d expected them achieve this feat by the end of 2016.

Geezam - How Netflix expansion to 130 Countries makes them a Global Streaming Powerhouse - 08-01-2016 LHDEER

The investors love this news, as the Stock Market rallied in response to the announcement by the Los Gatos, California Company Netflix. This expansion not only heralds Netflix becoming a global streaming powerhouse, but it means that their planned spend of some US$5 billion on licensing arrangements with movie and television studios will help them outbid competitors such as HBO, Amazon.com, YouTube and Hulu.

As of December 2016, Netflix was in sixty (60) countries, including Jamaica as noted in the article Is Netflix a Netjoke?. Despite the title of that critical article their service has improved somewhat, once you have FLOW Broadband, as it won’t stream well over Digicel’s “4G” Broadband as concluded in Digicel and LIME identified by Netflix’s ISP Index as the Slowest in the Caribbean.

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So what kind of viewership stats does Netflix has that proves they’re on a path towards becoming a global streaming powerhouse?

Netflix by the numbers – Expect huge profits as Streaming goes global

The list of 130 doesn’t include the following countries, again due to Government Restrictions on American and other foreign multi-nationals working in those countries:

  • North Korea
  • Syria
  • Crimea

CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings on Wednesday January 6th 2016 revealed some interesting stats on his company’s performance in 2015:

  • 42.5 billion hours of programming
  • 12 billion hours in the October-December fourth quarter
  • 8.25 billion hours in the October-December 2014 fourth quarter

This represents a 50% increase over 2014 or roughly 13 hours of programming, increasing from 12 hours the previous year. Part of Netflix’s strategy is to show exclusive content, which amounts to more than 50 exclusive TV shows and movies or roughly 600 hours of original programming.

This includes shows such as House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black as well as forays into producing their own show such as Man on the High Castle. They also check the tormenting websites to see what’s popular before buying the rights to that content as explained in Netflix uses Torrenting Trends to pick popular Content.

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Aside from Spanish, Netflix stream in twenty one (21) other languages to their 70 million subscribers with the exception of China. This is due to problems negotiating with the Central Communist Government, who object strongly to material from the West considered objectionable or incendiary.

If you get tired of Digicel Play, which isn’t all bad as detailed in How Digicel Play will spread the Gospel of Fiber Optic this Christmas, you can always use your blazing fast Fiber Optic Internet and a good VPN (Virtual Private Network) and get yourself an American Netflix account.

Then you can stream all those American shows unrestricted on your HDTV.

 

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