Neil Hunt, Netflix's Chief Product Officer, explains why the streaming selections vary from country to country on Quora:
Each country notionally has a different catalog, although there is substantial overlap. Licensing is generally for a region (e.g. Latin America, or Nordics), so countries within the region have very similar (but not identical) catalogs.
Sometimes a shared title is the same media in each country; sometimes the title has been edited (e.g. for ratings compliance, or just to add or removed a channel bumper), in which case it's actually a different media file. In general, the ID spaces are separate by region.
I'm sure that trying to secure international rights to some titles is probably a nightmare, but as Netflix grows it might get easier.
It's going to be a nightmare for Netflix when content owners finally clue in to foreign users getting around country specific licensing restrictions by re-routing their IP addresses through the US. It's rampant in Canada and the UK where the consensus is: our Netflix sucks, USA is much better so we're going to take advantage of it.
Posted by: bobzyouruncle | November 22, 2012 at 10:54 PM
In the UK, and yes our selection is pretty weak in comparison, since Sky owns nearly everything. However, with Unblock Us I can change freely between any of the other Netflix regions, and Moreflicks provides a multi-region search (which also includes Hulu). How long before they put a stop to this I wonder? Are they even able to stop it?
Posted by: Cafcmike | November 23, 2012 at 08:19 AM
Is it really surprising that Netflix US has more than UK, Canada, etc? I mean, 20+ million streaming customers are in the US. 5 million total for all the other countries combined. Mo'money=Mo'streaming
Posted by: Groggie | November 26, 2012 at 03:35 PM