An announcement of Netflix welcomes Cuba among the countries with access to its services, including the possibility to enjoy popular series like House of Cards or Orange is the New Black and other content curated by the company at 7.99 dollars only monthly.
The co-founder and CEO of the company, Reed Hastings, said they were delighted to finally offer Cubans Netflix connecting them with stories from around the world. “Cuba has great filmmakers and a culture of robust arts and hope to bring their work to our global audience of over 57 million members someday,” said Hastings.
Subscriptions to the service can only be made through credit cards, specifically American Express, Visa or Mastercard, which greatly limits the possibility of Cubans, although recently some of them announced their next insertion in the Cuban stage.
It is unknown whether the company will make available to subscribers titles like Che, Chevolution and Fidel: The Untold Story, which refers to the Cuban system and its heroes from a different point of view that the one of the Cuban government.
With this move, Netflix became one of the first companies to take advantage of the decision of the US government to reduce trade restrictions on Cuba since the early 1960. The company is aware of some Cubans have access to their services and hope that the situation will improve as the internet and the use of credit cards expand in the country.
It is no secret that one of the strategies the United States to Cuba to establish business via telecommunications companies that allows providing Cubans better service and internet communications. If demand increases through services like Netflix, in theory, the infrastructure should change to meet demand, which seems to be a tactic by the US government.
Moreover, it is striking that Netflix services are not available in countries like Japan, Australia, Spain and Russia, much more lucrative markets than Cuba´s. The Netflix concept is similar to the Cuban “weekly package” to make an offer multimedia content, high quality, from a fixed rate; however, this does not mean competition for the Cuban system due to the near absence of broadband in the country.
Netflix is a registered US company offering from a monthly fee the opportunity to enjoy multimedia content via streaming from anywhere in the world. Since its launch in 2007, how to “see” Television has changed to allow the user to select their own schedules to consume. Netflix entered the Latin American market in 2011 and to date has over 5 million members.
The streaming service is the live broadcast of multimedia content, which requires a broadband connection to access content with quality.
