After announcing expansion to Canada (here), Latin America (here) and the UK (here) - Bandwidth caps and copyright issues prevent Netflix from offering its streaming services in New Zealand.
Hamish Fletcher reports that Paul Brislen (pictured), CEO of Telecommunications User Association (TUANZ), said that Brent Ayrey, VP product innovation, Netflix told him that: ".. Netflix had no intention of launching in New Zealand. Despite the strong demand for online video and content, the quality of the local internet network and low data caps would be problematic for Netflix".
Mr. Brislen added that " .. [We heard that] next year the average Netflix customer in the US will need a data cap of one terabyte a month. I've got one of the bigger caps in New Zealand and I'm sitting at 60 gigabytes. I would need 1000 gigabytes of data. The whole crowd gasped at that point".
See for example - broadband plans from Telecom New Zealand (here). When the monthly cap is reached the subscriber can "Choose what happens when you exceed your data allowance: Continue at broadband speed for $2 [US$1.5] per extra GB or surf at reduced speed (64Kbps max) at no extra cost".
Note that for Canada, where bandwidth caps was an a major issue during the last months (here), Netflix offers a reduced quality option that "use 2/3 less data on average, with minimal impact to video quality. Now Canadians can watch 30 hours of streaming from Netflix in a month that will consume only 9 GBytes of data, well below most data caps "
See story at New Zealand Herald - "Netflix turned off by low data caps" - here.
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