This has to be a symbolic gesture, and hopefully one that rewards Cuban Internet interests. Currently, this isn't a viable offering for the average resident. I've travelled around plenty of Cuba, and Internet there will not support streaming media. Think poor dialup speeds from the early 1990s, flakey timeouts, dropped connections constantly, and you're imagining Cuban net access.
I've not sampled the connections available to government officials, but until Cuba gets a huge overhaul (read, installation) of a proper internet infrastructure, and peering to multiple countries, they won't be able to make use of this.
Wikipedia has some figures from 2011-2013, which says the "total bandwidth between Cuba and the global Internet is just 209 Mbit/s upstream and 379 downstream" for "2.8 million users" [1]. A bit of a personal reflection, but my life would be much different, in terms of work, education, and entertainment, if I did not have access to reliable high speed internet.
A study in 2013 would have been prior to the commissioning of the ALBA-1 cable from Venezuela though. While a single link is still pretty fragile, it's likely that capacity for the island is more in the range of hundreds of GB/S to low TB/s now.
Not sure where that 2.8million users number comes from as there is no way ~20% of Cubans have internet service. (11.2mil population) Unless they count being able to get online with censored connections from some schools as having internet?
I would think one shared connection can have many users. It would be analogous to a family sharing a computer going to Facebook which counts them as four users not one, because four sets of services are being delivered. If they meant connections I think they would have said that.
Ignoring the Internet speed part, I think the average Cuban takes home around $20/month too.
Just feels like giant PR fluff, it would have been interesting to see them offer cheaper and lower bit-rate service for Cubans that won't completely saturate their networks.
I don't get it. Why? This can only be symbolic. Why not take it to Russia, China even.
If this is symbolic it means netflix is willing to do things which don't go toward profit but are willing to do 'symbolic' things. Meaning they are okay with not making money, if that thing fits their ideology --which is fine, great, but it just means there are other things which affect them beside a motive for profits or altruism or free expression, etc.
It's like Caterpillar saying, we're going to build an asteroid-digger.
Or the WWF deciding to build a do-do bird conservation area.
Opening up to Cuba probably costs Netflix extremely little. In terms of rights negotiating their content suppliers are currently getting nothing from Cuba so will go for it without any discussions, so all Netflix needs to do is flick a switch in their control panel to allow IPs from Cuba and issue a press release.
Sure, even if 100% of Cuba's broadbrand subscribers signed up it's an insignificant amount to Netflix, but for the low cost they may well think of it as PR and/or marketing (and/or looking ahead to a day when maybe Cuba could give them enough revenue to care about - though seems unlikely to me), not just for ideological reasons.
Id like to point out, that if they are making a decent wage it's almost certainly illegally in context to Cuba's laws. (My wife is from Cuba, she has many of her family still living there)
I know very little about Cuba, but given it's been cut off economically from most of the world, it's no surprise that currencies would be different down there.
According to Numbeo.com [1] a cost of basic utilities (Electricity, Heating, Water, Garbage) for 85m2 Apartment is ~$6.09/month. A one-way ticket on local transport is $0.04. I've picked two that jumped out at me as crazily cheap compared to places like the US/UK, but looking down that list I don't know if living on $17/month is doable. But without fully understanding the environment/economy... it's a lot more complicated than just thinking that $17 could never be enough to live on.
Generally It's not enough to live on. However there is a thriving black market, prostitution or just "hooking up" with wealthy foreigners is common. For example a bartender at a resort will likely have his/her own bottle of alcohol behind the counter and sell that while pocketing the cash, later when they check the alcohol everything lines up for drinks sold vs revenue but the bartender skimmed $x in revenue off the top. Underground capitalism/entrepreneurship is how people get by (risking serious jail time daily).
Looks like there's a typo in the Guardian article, in addition to the quote you give there is also:
> The country has 53 broadband internet accounts today, according to Kelly.
edit: Definitely 5,300. Note at the bottom reads "This story was amended on 9 February to correct the number of broadband accounts in Cuba. There are 5,300."
Some additional details on access to the Internet in Cuba:
1) There is only one ISP in Cuba: Etecsa. Cubans can not buy an Internet account from them to use at home, accounts must be used a special cyber cafes around the island at exorbitant rates by the hour/megabyte: http://www.etecsa.cu/?page=internet_conectividad&sub=interne...
2) Foreign entities, either persons or enterprises can have an interned account, dialup or broadband, See the rates section for "Acceso dedicado" on the same page. from 22 USD a month for 20h at dial up speeds all the way to 30010.00 CUC for 3.4 Mbs. Thats over $30000 USD.
3) Some cubans have dialup accounts either internet or limited access to several national networks on which a proxy can be found (usually not legally) this covers doctors, artists, athletes and others.
4) There is a booming black market for dialup accounts with rates going from 50 to 120 CUC (60 to 140 USD), usually foreigners time sharing their accounts but other type of accounts can be found if you know the right people (illegal and prosecuted).
5) Most universities have internet access with very limited bandwidth (~2mbs) shared among students and professors.
A few years ago, I read that cuba had like 250 MBPS for the entire island. A cuban guy told me that dial up was as expensive as a cheap appartment. (I dont know if their band has broadened, because Venezuela said publicly that they would connect a cable to them, but never heard of it actually happening).
Considering the extremely little bandwidth they have, a homebrew wireless 'cable' from Florida or Mexico would be a game changer for Cuba.
I guess this is more of a symbolic gesture than anything else but I will take it as reminder that we take for granted so easily the fruits of a free market economy like united states while actively encouraging government involvement for the so called "fairness". Cuba is probably most fair among all countries. Almost everyone is pretty much destitute.
This article and the press release by Netflix fails to mention anything about their DVD rental service. Since Cuba's current internet infrastructure has not been developed, streaming videos seems a bit premature. Some may dismiss this as a token gesture, but I believe it would be smart for Netflix to expand in Cuba as they did originally in the US.
Funny, I think it was 60 minutes which had a story about Cuba that mentioned there was no internet in the country. Reporters seem to get a lot of facts wrong.
Then they probably should have waited a bit longer with the Germany launch.
Seriously, I check allflicks to see what's new and out of 10 new movies/tvshows almost always 7-8 of them are for kids. They might as well rename their service "Netflix Kids: Germany" or something.
It's one thing only offering a tiny subset of the US catalog but quite another to only add kids stuff. That area has got to be twice or three times the size of the non-kids sections.
Refer to page 3, where it is reported that 74.5% of households 25 years and up had some internet subscription (and 73.5% had high-speed access). That's no small number, but you could easily call "3 in 4" short of ubiquitous. Note that many of the remaining households have some form of access to the internet, just not a subscription at home.
It's a true statement, but it makes little sense in context. Parentheticals are supposed to relate to the surrounding text somehow, and I just don't see it here.
You would be surprised (maybe?) at the number of rural areas in the U.S. that do not have any real type of access. My parents, for example, are limited to ~1mbit downloads on good days. They cannot stream Netflix and really can't stream Youtube videos either. That 1mbit is with random bursts of noise/packet loss as well. It's pretty crappy. I tried to game there once and saw my latency fluctuate between 200ms and 10,000ms.
Wikipedia puts the fraction of the U.S. population using the internet at about 81%.[1] They link to a source, but beware it links straight to an excel file[2].
I've not sampled the connections available to government officials, but until Cuba gets a huge overhaul (read, installation) of a proper internet infrastructure, and peering to multiple countries, they won't be able to make use of this.