Telkom Says Netflix No Longer Available on South Africa Provider

Telkom SA said Netflix will no longer be available on the South African phone and internet company's set-top box from October. From a report: A deal between the parties has come to an end and will not be renewed, Content Executive Wanda Mkhize said in a statement, without giving a specific reason. Other content partnerships will be announced in due course, she said. The move comes after MultiChoice, Africa's largest pay-TV provider, signed deals with Netflix and Amazon.com to offer their streaming services through its new decoder. The continent is a small market for paid streaming video, with just a few million subscribers out of a population of more than 1 billion, and the U.S. giants have targeted it for future growth.

Re: Why are cable companies useful

[Goatbot]

He who controls content distribution controls streaming. Netflix was so successful early on as everyone believed it would never go anywhere and the content distributors were not being paid anything so any money Netflix gave them was 100% profit never seen on the books before. Fast forward today and every show almost becomes it's own streaming station and the VC money is flowing hard and fast as everyone tries to become the next Disney+. Netflix is starting to get pretty mature and has been having its lunch

Re: Why are cable companies useful

[fred6666]

You mean paying a monthly fee to get pirated content? That sounds like the dumbest advice.

Re:

[larwe]

It has been a thing for a very long time, though - remember pirated satellite decoder cards? (I don't know if that's still around though). The money you pay, you're paying for plug and play - someone else is finding the streams for you, moving them around as the content owners play whack a mole, etc.

Re: Why are cable companies useful

[Goatbot]

As soon as it requires rooting the access device with someone software I really don't want anything to do with it.

Re:

[larwe]

why would you use a cable box to watch Netflix

Netflix was probably paying the cable provider to have their app on that STB for the same reason Amazon, Hulu, Netflix etc all pay to have custom buttons on smart TV remotes. It's all about reducing friction for the end user - they already have the cable remote in their hand. We can also surmise that this cost for product placement and maintenance of the app wasn't being paid back in terms of new subscribers.

Re: Why are cable companies useful

[Goatbot]

Last I checked the satellite piracy scene is still going strong. It isn't as public as it once was but if you look around there are tools out there for just about all of them.

Will they block vpn's? will there be an Linear tv

[Joe_Dragon]

Will they block vpn's? will there be an Linear TV channel with Netflix on an loop as an work around?

Decoder

[enriquevagu]

Telkom Says Netflix No Longer Available on its own set-top box.

FTFY

The market is very small and Netflix does not want to bother doing QA on such a device. Nothing to see here, they do not claim that Netflix cannot be accessed from a browser or the native TV app.

Yet another terrible Slashdot headline.

[MikeDataLink]

Netflix is not being blocked. Netflix chose not to develop for this small hardware platform and therefore the cable box itself will no longer have a netflix App. You Apple TV, Roku, Chromecast, Web Browser, etc will all still work just fine.