More Entertainment Options as Netflix Launches in South Africa

The successful U.S. streaming entertainment company Netflix has broadened its global outreach to South Africa, where it launched this week and goes up against local streaming company ShowMax, which began in 2015.

South Africa is one of 130 countries that will get Netflix from Wednesday. The latest move means that Netflix is now available in 190 countries. It is still not available in China, Syria and North Korea, among other countries.

“You are witnessing the birth of a global TV network,” Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive, said on Wednesday during a keynote address at International CES, the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas.

Reed said that while he was on stage, standing under the banner #netflixeverywhere, Netflix had switched on in the 130 new locations, including South Africa, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, India, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Turkey and Indonesia.

Numerous European countries were added to the Netflix roster in 2015.

The company, which offers a month-long free trial, reportedly has 66.02 million paying subscribers in the U.S. and 23.95 million in international markets.

South Africa’s local streaming service Showmax, which was started by Naspers in April and offers similar shows to Netflix for R99 a month (Netflix costs at least $7.99), offers much of the same content but also has the premier U.S. cable channel HBO.

Showmax said it’s “good news that we have another major player in the market who’ll generate additional interest in internet TV. This is a new segment in South Africa and so far one of the major challenges has been helping people understand what subscription video-on-demand is and how it works. In all likelihood, the more people talking about the subject, the more we’ll see the potential customer base grow.

“Content varies across the different providers and from what we’ve seen in other countries people often subscribe to more than one service, so it’s not an either-or situation.

“We’ve got exclusive international content from studios such as HB0, and on top of this with our Mzansi and kykNET sections we’ve got local content covered as well.” (ShowMax recently made KykNet’s 6,000 hours of Afrikaans programming available to audiences in the UK, U.S., Australia, Canada and New Zealand.)

Showmax says it also has a number of key product differentiators developed specifically for the unique South African market such as the ability to download content, which helps broaden access to people who don’t have a great internet connection; and offering vouchers in stores which means users don’t need a credit card to access their service.