Netflix Now Available In Cuba 125
aBaldrich writes Streaming video service Netflix will be available to Cuban customers starting today, at the $7.99 U.S. per month rate that it offers in the U.S., the company announced today. It'll still require an international payment method for now, as well as Internet access (which still isn't ubiquitous in [Cuba]), but it's an early start that Netflix says it wanted to offer in order to have it available as Cuban Internet access expands, and debit and credit cards become more available to Cuban citizens.
Until now, Cubans have had little access to this kind of American entertainment. The U.S. government maintains a floating balloon tethered to an island in the Florida Keys that broadcasts the pro-democracy TV Marti network. The Cuban government constantly jams the signal.
"Cuba has great filmmakers and a robust arts culture, and one day we hope to be able to bring their work to our global audience," Reed Hastings, the company's co-founder and chief executive officer, said in the statement.
Right on time... (Score:3)
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House of Cards season 3. So very appropriate.
Hmmm .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Available to Cubans with access to broadband, and international payment methods.
So, Raul and Fidel?
Do you have any idea how much $7.99/month is to an average Cuban? More than what they make.
I'm afraid the douchiness of NetFlix making this announcement is mind-boggling as it seems so disconnected from reality as to be absurd.
I fear Cuba isn't ready for the influx of crap this kind of thing is going to do to its society. And no matter what the idealists say, you can't magically turn their economy into a modern thing without causing more damage than you fix.
The "free market" as they'll see it will eat them alive, I'm afraid.
Re:Hmmm .... (Score:4, Interesting)
So Netflix is roughtly 1/3 of an average monthly salary, which is still a considerable amount, but I would imagine that given the limited access to internet there, the cost of Netflix is hardly the largest barrier.
The "free market" as they'll see it will eat them alive, I'm afraid.
I suspect that the U.S. removing embargoes and trading with Cuba will do a lot to improve their economy. The tourism industry is also likely to see a lot of growth. I don't see how this will "eat them alive" though.
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First the infrastructure needs to be put in place. This will happen through the wealthier asking to get better internet access. Facilities such as vacation resorts will also invest in said technology to improve their customers experience.
A rich communist walks into a bar... (Score:2)
First the infrastructure needs to be put in place. This will happen through the wealthier asking to get better internet access. Facilities such as vacation resorts will also invest in said technology to improve their customers experience.
Wealthier? CAPITALIST RUNNING DOG, THIS! IS! COMMUNISM!!!
I thought that the whole point of Communism was that nobody was 'rich' or 'poor'....
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Go to Cuba and travel through their towns and tell me there aren't some that are better off. You'll quickly realize there are.
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I thought that the whole point of Communism was that nobody was 'rich' or 'poor'....
Go to Cuba and travel through their towns and tell me there aren't some that are better off. You'll quickly realize there are.
Sarcasm [wikipedia.org], its a thing...
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Funny, I though the whole point of Capitalism was that when rich douchebags got richer they made the world better for all of us, instead of just concentrating wealth and power with rich douchebags.
Oh, wait, you mean economic ideology is a lie? And that Capitalism is just as much complete bullshit as Communism?
My god, man, you could destroy the world with that knowledge.
Fuck knows the idiots making policy who believe either
Re:Hmmm .... (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I would say it is considerably up from what Cubans told me it was ... but, I'll take it on face value since it's not completely out of whack.
The Cuban tourism indust already represents about 60% of GDP, and has done so for a long time. A lot of their infrastructure is more or less at capacity, and isn't going to scale well.
Last I was there, they'd doubled the size of the Juan Gomez airport in Varadero ... and they were so over-run that the airport had been reduced to pure chaos -- they had dozens more flights than they could handle. And the resorts themselves didn't know when they were getting huge influxes of people and were unprepared for it. So all of a sudden they had a few hundred people showing up and no rooms for them.
Well, I can give you some examples ...
Cuba still has a fair amount of people who are little above dirt poor. They have health care, and schooling, but often not much else. Which means there's a lot of pan-handling. For years people have been told to bring toiletries and the like, because the Cubans can't buy them ... over the last few years, they've become much more aggressively looking for cash.
The tourism trade has been suffering from a larger amount of outright scams since I've been going -- last I was there I bought a bunch of MP3 CDs, most of which turned out to be blank. They're not even trying any more. They're just getting more brazen and saying "fuck it".
Your average Cuban lines up along the side of the road to get a ride from one city to another to work ... and the broke down buses they are on versus the ones the tourists are on are really demonstrating that it's a 3rd world country.
A lot of the most educated people in Cuba work on the resorts ... because you get paid more as a bar tender than you do as an engineer in Cuba.
Start bringing large corporations trying to sell them crap they don't need, and they'll be diverting some of their limited money to crap like NetFlix. Corporations like Coca Cola will put their own domestic industries out of buisiness.
Cuba's biggest draw is its beaches, and in many places they're already at capacity and becoming full of garbage as the tourists throw their plastic cups and cigarette butts around. There's only so much beach.
When I say it will eat them alive, I'm saying if you had a sudden increase of even more tourists, they're simply not going to be able to keep up with it. Service and quality will go down across the board -- in fact, I'll argue it already has.
Start importing even more social problems like drugs, or even more widespread prostitution, and things will get worse for them.
Cuba is a small country, with limited resources, and a fairly fragile economy. It simply isn't going to survive a rapid transition without some serious pain, and it might be pain which they don't recover from.
Too much change, too rapidly, and you could seriously make things FAR worse for many people.
In my experience, in the last bunch of years, these things are already happening in Cuba. And, quite frankly, it's likely to keep getting worse.
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Then I would say it is considerably up from what Cubans told me it was ... but, I'll take it on face value since it's not completely out of whack.
The Cuban tourism indust already represents about 60% of GDP, and has done so for a long time. A lot of their infrastructure is more or less at capacity, and isn't going to scale well.
Last I was there, they'd doubled the size of the Juan Gomez airport in Varadero ... and they were so over-run that the airport had been reduced to pure chaos -- they had dozens more flights than they could handle. And the resorts themselves didn't know when they were getting huge influxes of people and were unprepared for it. So all of a sudden they had a few hundred people showing up and no rooms for them.
The nice thing about Tourism as an industry is that scale only relates to demand (see winter vs summer demand in Florida as an example of how this already works). Too many tourists? Double the room rates. Double the restaurant prices. Double the airfare. No, triple it! A new horde of US tourists surging demand in Cuba will just drive up prices. Even crappy hotels have no problem accommodating for supply vs demand by racing up the price curve.
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Too many tourists? Double the room rates. Double the restaurant prices. Double the airfare. No, triple it! A new horde of US tourists surging demand in Cuba will just drive up prices.
Which means that the owners of the resorts will get more money, which they will spend in the local economy, which means more money for the locals.
The big bucks will be in medical tourism (Score:2)
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I'd like to go down there for dental care. I was planning on going to TJ, but I'd really prefer not these days.
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I'd much rather have Netflix make inroads in Cuba than our cable companies and other media providers.
If only there was some way to raise prices (Score:2)
While we're on the subject, I know Electrical Engineers doing entry level support ( the IT equivalent of waiting tables ) because offshoring has killed their jobs and they're not mobile (own houses/have kids/etc). The Cuban embargo and the global race to the bottom has probably done more to kill those engineer's careers than Castro ever did.
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According to an article in the Havana Times the average salary in Cuba (as of 2012) was ~$22 based on a report released by the Cuban government.
Great, now what's the median salary? Cuba has great disparity of wealth just like everywhere else.
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Cubans are making around $14/month (police and military are at $21/month. That's a USD amount. They also receive food ration vouchers. All other monies are tips from tourists, favors, etc. It's still above the poverty line, but $7.99 for Netflix? Yeah, sure.
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You'd be surprised what a free people will do once oppressive government is removed from their backs.
I went to Jamaica in 2001, and all those poor, poor Jamaicans running the tourist nick nack stalls had cell phones.
A free people will bust ass to acquire the good stuff. How patronizing are many posts in this thread, suggesting this is a bad thing.
What it really suggests is an overbearing government is bad for many reasons, and that there's a hell of a lot more to freedom than freedom of speech.
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So, what exactly leads you to believe that Cubans are about to get "oppressive government removed from their backs"?
No, Obama opening up relations with Cuba isn't going to accomplish that.
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Keeping up the pretend embargo isn't going to accomplish that either.
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I went to Jamaica in 2001, and all those poor, poor Jamaicans running the tourist nick nack stalls had cell phones.
But did they have refrigerators? [cc.com]
Back in the 80s and 90s, there was sort of a stigma to having a cell phone in America--namely only rich/important people had cell phones because wired phones in the home were relatively inexpensive. We spent a ton of money wiring America back in the 1930s and 1940s because that was the only way to do it back then. So people had telephones in their houses because the government essentially subsidized the expense of a phone.
Compared with the expense of running wires all over
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The "free market" as they'll see it will eat them alive, I'm afraid.
Not if the free market is also allowed to set their wages.
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What, like it does in the US where the "free market" lets them bring in TFWs and lower the wage?
You'll excuse me if I think the notion of the free market doing anything to help anybody except corporations is complete and utter bullshit. The free market is a rigged game, and always will be.
It doesn't do it in the first world, it sure as hell doesn't do it in developing nations.
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What, like it does in the US where the "free market" lets them bring in TFWs and lower the wage?
I have no idea what a "TFW" is, but the US has the highest average earned income in the world [wikipedia.org]. So using it as a negative example doesn't appear to be sensible.
Cuba is 90 miles from America, and has a literate and educated workforce. They should be earning at least as much as Mexicans, who are less educated. Yet Mexicans earn more than twenty times as much.
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their workforce is not literate compared to the rest of the world as far as computer literacy and general knowledge is concerned.
Literate does not mean knowledgeable. It means able to read.
Re:Hmmm .... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, what's weird is people continue to believe "free market" isn't a lie no matter where you are in the world, and continue to ascribe magical outcomes to what is essentially every greedy bastard optimizing his own greed, and has NOTHING to do with reality.
The "free market" is an abstraction. And it's a complete fucking lie.
Let's stop letting the game be rigged in favor of corporations so they can keep lying to us and stacking the odds in their favor -- let's finally realize the corporations are precisely WHY it's a rigged game.
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So because by your admission the free market is based on faulty reasoning, that means it's a lie?
It's a term. You must have issues with a lot of the dictionary in that case. It would be very difficult to have a conversation with you if you redefine all terms to match your personal beliefs.
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That's right comrade - a centrally planned command economy will take care of these problems. Viva la Revolucion!
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That 'lie' built you. Everything from the clothes on your back to the computer you're typing on, the Internet, food, and your home came from the free market.
Making up god damn lies and hating them is a path to destruction. Seek help.
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No, since no market has ever been free -- free of externalities, free of cheating, free of collusion, free of cartels, free of things which make it not a free market -- no fucking free market has ever existed. It was a market, but it was never a free market.
You people who blindly say "Yarg, teh free market fixes all teh problems and teh rest is da soci
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But how many people can you piggyback on one account?
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Do you have any idea how much $7.99/month is to an average Cuban? More than what they make...
The "free market" as they'll see it will eat them alive, I'm afraid.
You're going to blame Netflix for Cubans' low monthly income? I thought that Cuba, like all communist countries, was a "worker's paradise"?
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I know many Cubans and I agree that $8 per month is a large portion of a monthly salary so unless the Cuban customer has an external source of income, it will be very difficult under normal conditions. However, there is a very large portion of the population with family outside of the country which funnels in money and the Cubans getting that money have more than enough money to buy this service.
For those that can get a dependable connection and I can see them paying for the service by hosting a black marke
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The "free market" as they'll see it will eat them alive, I'm afraid.
Or perhaps not - poor they may be, but idiots? Take a critical look at what we, in the capitalistic part of the world have to offer; is it really all that great? Yeah, the prospect of getting rich seems attractive, but the abysmal inequality, the broken promises of the not-really-democracy, the hollowness of the freedoms etc - I think people in Cuba can see those problems clearly, and I'm not convinced they will want all of that.
Another thing is the question of who is going to eat who - just look at China a
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probably because they'll be in FL.
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A lot of rural regions in the U.S. are not only fairly sparsely populated but also aren't really that much better off economically than Cuba.
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Note: I assume here they're not counting satellite or dial-up internet as "internet." I assume they meant "broadband capable of Netflix streaming" when they said "internet."
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Satellite internet should work fine for Netflix. It's not latency sensitive, and while Satellite is typically not blazingly fast, it works fine at lower speeds, and the dynamic scaling is pretty seamless.
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Please, name 3 regions in the US — rural or otherwise — where the average monthly income is $20 [foxnews.com]. Heck, let's make it $200 — which is ten times, what Cubans earn — because they don't have to pay for that wonderful healthcare [nationalcenter.org] of theirs.
You said, there are "a lot" of such regions, so coming up with 3 should be no problem. Thank you.
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And are you comparing the purchasing power of that 20$/200$ with the prices in Cuba or the prices in the U.S.A.?
Granted, if Netflix are actually asking 7.99 U.S. dollars per month from Cubans, they'll have a problem. Unless they meant it was for the whole of Cuba? Maybe they'll be able to afford it. Just use the same resolution as a VideoCD but with the compression capabilities of H.264 and that will also solve the bandwidth problem.
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Dollar is a dollar. Labor-intensive and locally-produced things (like prostitution and cigars) are remarkably cheaper in Cuba, but few people regularly partake of all that. A pound of rice costs the same anywhere, and a TV-set is much cheaper in America.
But, what the heck, let's throw in another adjustment: can you list 3 regions of the US, where average income is below $400 a month? That's 20 ti
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A pound of rice costs the same anywhere
It really doesn't. One kilo of rice costs C$3.67 in Montreal. One kilo of rice costs C$0.98 in Havana. Not everything is cheaper, but many things are.
You can see the direct comparison here:
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-... [numbeo.com]
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No sure, what's wrong with Montreal — or the numbeo-site, where you got your numbers — but an American Costco sells a 50-pound bag of rice for $22.69 [costco.com]. That's 23kg, or just under $1/kg.
And, of course, you can buy as much as you'd like of it, whereas in Cuba the quantities are limited [wikipedia.org] by the loving and caring government officials.
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It could depend on the brand, the type of rice and where you buy it.
I live in a small town without a Costo so I buy my rice at a grocery store and a 4.54kg bag of Tilda brand, basmati rice costs around 17$CAD, or 3.75$CAD/kg which is basically the same price as in Montreal so Guspaz probably also used a grocery store price.
Keep in mind that some food costs a lot less in the U.S.A. than in Canada, but doing a Canadian grocery store vs U.S.A. Costco price comparison is pointless.
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It's not a valid comparison to compare the price of 1kg of rice to the bulk price...
For example, looking at WalMart Canada, they'll sell you 8kg of rice for C$1.06 per kilo, or they'll sell you 900g for C$2.52 per kilo.
Of course, the 900g price is decently lower than the prices that Numbeo is quoting, but the basic premise holds true: food has different prices in different places. For one thing, the ability and willingness of people to pay more can drive prices up. For another thing, the cost of transport c
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50 pounds is hardly "bulk". Costco's price is what the food costs. Everything extra you pay on top of that is for the fancy convenience of small portions, not waiting in line, etc.
Perhaps. But Costco is for people, who seek a no-frills bargain. That they are able to find it shows, rice does cost about the same in US as in Cuba.
Now, how abou
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Granted, if Netflix are actually asking 7.99 U.S. dollars per month from Cubans, they'll have a problem. Unless they meant it was for the whole of Cuba? Maybe they'll be able to afford it. Just use the same resolution as a VideoCD but with the compression capabilities of H.264 and that will also solve the bandwidth problem.
It's 7.99 for all of Cuba, but approximately 11.7 milliion Cubans will be staring at this message most of the time:
Your Netflix account is in use on another device. Please stop playing on other devices to continue. Visit Netflix.com/help for more information
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You should visit the back woods of Montana or Arkansas some time, it'll enlighten you. Also, we still have "Indian Reservations" and the tribes don't *all* own casinos. Adjust for inflation and lack of demand due to how sparse the population is in some areas and you'll find that its really easy to get out-of-range of modern cable/dsl/fiber internet once you're in a place where the ratio of Deer per square mile is 5x that of humans. I know someone who lived about a mile outside of a town of about 4,000 pe
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Really? I thought I just enumerated 3 of them, as you requested. Its not like you're gonna be able to find these places on Google Maps. The whole continent isn't a city, bro.
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You forgot to provide evidence of the average income in each — choosing to talk instead about availability of Internet service there instead. Try again.
I'm not your brother — keep your creepy attempts at fraternization to yourself.
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I'm not your brother —
Yea well I know that but I meant it sarcastically.
You forgot to provide evidence of the average income in each — choosing to talk instead about availability of Internet service there instead.
You can pretend all you want that the fact of the differences in base costs of living and the lack of availability of network infrastructure that is Netflix-capable across the vast majority of the geographic area of the continental USA is as irrelevant to my initial statement and the relative economic status of Cuba vs places in the USA you can only get to after driving for hours down unpaved dirt/gravel roads, but I doubt most the rest of the readers of thi
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No, sonny, that's not, how it works. You make a statement — you supply substantiation. Best is to do that in advance. Absolutely must do it, when requested. Several replies later, you still don't offer the substantiation. It is perfectly logical to conclude, it does not exist.
Citation needed. NBC would be fine.
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Well, far be it for me to pull your head out of the sand. For some reason you seem really defensive about this, like the truth would shatter your fragile grasp on reality. I suggest not turning on the TV to something other than fox news...
Might I suggest "Juan Of The Dead" ... (Score:1)
... as their first selection. "Juan Of The Dead" on IMDB [imdb.com]
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More likely those black and white "I Love Lucy" shows with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez. You know, "that Cuban guy" :-)
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Great, now we can expect an influx of "Desi Arnez is a Batista crony whose capitalist show undermines the people! But that episode where they worked at the candy factory was pretty funny" posts on IMDB.
Sigh. (Score:2, Interesting)
Another ruination of a non-Americanised culture begins, and the homogenisation continues. Great if you like the One True God, but pretty shit if you are interested in pretty much any other option.
Those "pro-democracy" activists who get involved in pirate networks like Marti (N.B. it's "piracy" precisely when a government doesn't like it - just as it would be if I blasted a social-democratic propaganda station from an offshore vessel close to New York, say) do not really represent Cuba, btw. They represent t
Re:Sigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the US embargoes Cuba, they're being imperialistic. If the US decides to do business with them, they are going to ruin their culture and make it another satellite. Talk about "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
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Did you genuinely just do a, "Won't somebody please think of the United States?"
The fact that you have talked about dissemination of culture in terms of "doing business" shows that you've already been so wedded to the American Way that you can't see that anything could possibly be wrong - culture is just a commodity to be bought and sold, right?
The first step is not to have a single, powerful, self-interested organisation (governmental or private) with any ability to control the distribution of culture. Whe
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"The fact that you have talked about dissemination of culture in terms of 'doing business'"
The whole point of the embargo was to prevent US businesses from doing trade with Cuba. So the solution is to maintain it so that Cuban culture can be protected?
How has opening a Ford dealership in France or an Apple Store in Italy stifled their culture? Not much based off of the last visit I had. Do you expect this to be different for Cuba?
Besides, free speech and personal freedom are cultural attributes worth shari
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Stallman, is that you? ;-)
The long game. (Score:2)
Another ruination of a non-Americanised culture begins
What will American culture look like when the population is majority Hispanic?brNetflix isn't in Cuba looking for it can sell, it is looking for what it can buy.
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If you think that's bad, wait until we deploy the WWE and Nascar apps.
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Yes, in exchange for 100% taxation and not being free to leave (even moving to a different town within Cuba requires police' permission).
Which is precisely the deal, slaves were getting on plantations. The fools weren't happy with that for some reason...
"Free Healthcare and Education" (Score:2)
Costa Rica has that too
Along with human rights, multiparty democracy and an open internet
Positive step I suppose but only for wealthy (Score:2)
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The upper bracket will get to enjoy the entertainment initially hence forcing the infrastructure to improve. As the infrastructure improves the rest of the country will get to benefit as well.
Haven't we read a story similar to this before? (Score:2)
"There are some hard lessons about the dangers of cooperation that are strongly in the memories of these companies," says John Morgan. "Something that makes partnering harder, even when it might make economic sense to do so."
I can only think of Microsoft and its failed partnerships. [asymco.com]
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The link doesn't paint a full picture of Microsoft's failure/success. Considering they reported $86.8 B in earnings last year I would say these failures didn't affected their success (they were profitable in case you ask)
Not one person or company would look good if all you listed was their failures.
Fantastic (Score:2)
Honestly this will probably be more effective at spreading democracy to Cuba than the embargo. Slam them with American culture and get paid for it.
SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope you understand my frustration.
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Re: SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:1)
The fact that Netflix can't stream internationally without special licencing agreements is an artifact of American IP laws. It's not the fault of every non-American government.
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Bandwidth? (Score:2)
Do they have Internet bandwidth available for this in Cuba?
Let the MSM advertise your business for free (Score:3)
Do we have editors at /.? (Score:1)
I have a hard time believing an editor would let slide:
I really hope the "editor" just managed to drop a couple of "as" (one before and one after "ubiquitous"), otherwise I'd have to assume he's got the IQ of a clam....
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I really hope the "editor" just managed to drop a couple of "as" (one before and one after "ubiquitous"), otherwise I'd have to assume he's got the IQ of a clam....
Why, because they stated a fact? We still have a lot of citizens with no internet access. Most of them are pretty old, granted.
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There are no doubt people with no internet access here. But there are very few, if any, who are without internet access because they just can't get it.
Even my mom, who is in her late 70's and lives out in the boonies, found a way to get enough internet access for her purposes....
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There are no doubt people with no internet access here. But there are very few, if any, who are without internet access because they just can't get it./quote>
True, but there's lots of people who cannot buy internet access suitable for netflix for any reasonable price. Broadband penetration in the USA is pretty poor, to say nothing of penetration of service as good as the FCC has recently mandated "broadband" to be. In terms of land area, there's virtually nowhere you can get 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up without paying professional money.
Yay \o/ (Score:1)
Yay \o/
Another win for democracy?
All good things must come to an end :D
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Better watch out, McDonalds will be next. . .
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Apparently already covered, although pretty much everything about the article is wrong apart from this: McDonald's is the easiest target because it is American and it is everywhere. It has become the symbol of all that's wrong with the U.S., which is making the world fat and imposing our calorie counts and McRibs on a planet that is quite happy with its insect meals and pasty flour dishes. [entrepreneur.com]
"pro-democracy TV Marti network" (Score:2)
I like how the USG has to set up a special TV network just to get a pro-democracy viewpoint on the air.
If only they could get ABC/NBC/CBS to air such content... I suppose they don't transmit in SD any longer and Fox offered but the USG said, "no, we want to promote US culture, not give the Castro regime prima facie evidence against it."
The Lucy Show! (Score:2)
...
American Soft Power (Score:1)
This is a prime example of American soft power in action. From Hollywood, to Netflix, to Wall Street, to McDonalds, the American culture machine is perhaps the strongest soft power force in world history.
This is one of the primary reasons the embargo should have been lifted a long time ago. American hard power (military, government loans, etc) has always been the go-to strategy for dealing with issues, but they often forget the might of American culture and business.
Why saber rattle at authoritarian lead
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Did you even read the post he commented on? It had nothing to do with politics.
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Uhm, no. If the current clique is allowed to rule America for much longer, there will be lean and cautious people talking in hints and reading between the lines on both sides of the straits.
GG Socialism!
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Personally, I think the best way to freedom is to allow people to see what they are missing.
Just watch. The most popular movies will end up being like Rendition [wikipedia.org] and Wag the Dog [wikipedia.org].