Netflix admits its plan for China has failed

[Cooley Hurd]

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/18/technology/netflix-china/index.html

Netflix's goal of reaching every country on earth has run into a regulatory buzzsaw in China.
The streaming video service, which issued an otherwise sterling earnings report on Monday, acknowledged that its expansion plans have come up short in a market with 1.4 billion potential customers.

"The regulatory environment for foreign digital content services in China has become challenging," Netflix said in a letter to shareholders.

Instead of launching its own service in the famously restrictive market, it will instead license content to local companies. It expects only modest revenue from the licensing business.
Western media and tech companies have been trying to crack the China market for decades. But content is heavily censored by Beijing, and many websites, including Google (GOOG) and Facebook (FB, Tech30), are blocked.

Netflix (NFLX, Tech30) debuted in Asia last September, starting with Japan. At the time, CEO Reed Hastings said he was working on plans to be in every country in the region in 2016 -- including China.

It wasn't long before the company's ambitions grew to include the entire globe.
In January, Netflix launched in 130 more countries, including many that are tricky for international media companies. It started using the hashtag #netflixeverywhere.

But several countries, including North Korea and Syria, remained off limits. China was missing, too.

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[Igel]

1. Of course.

The country's leadership and much of its population is nationalistic, xenophobic, and protectionist. Make China Great Again! is the prevailing philosophy; all territory that was ever Chinese is forever Chinese. The only reason China hasn't always been a great power because foreigners.

Put this in a society that's not big into social trust and you have a strong government with little chance of being shaken.

It's fascism redux, and protectionist to the hilt. The two ideas go hand-in-hand: Us first, us forever.

There's a reason China is such good friends with Putin. Partly they're playing him and his ego, larger than all Siberia, and his imperialist aspirations for Russia blinds him to this; partly he's a convenient ally for the present.

He really thinks that long term the power that wants a huge amount of the South China Sea based on little reasonable claim to the area is going to stop when it sees a large, rich, sparsely populated area to the north? All they have to do is claim that they have to protect Chinese wherever they are and Russia, with a huge illegal Chinese immigrant problem along it's southern border to the east, will be hoist on its own petard: It's Putin's reasoning against lesser powers to his SE. To remove the immigrants would be ethnic cleansing; to allow them to stay would mean ceding the territory. Stay tuned for the real Moscow 2048.