T&T is still very much in­to Net­flix and chill.

How­ev­er, the pop­u­lar stream­ing plat­form’s pop­u­lar­i­ty is silent­ly a sig­nif­i­cant ex­trac­tor of lo­cal for­eign ex­change with T&T sub­scribers spend­ing mil­lions of US dol­lars an­nu­al­ly to main­tain their ac­counts.

Lo­cal tele­coms ex­pert, Kwe­si Prescod, said no one but Net­flix and its share­hold­ers knows how many house­holds in T&T sub­scribe to the stream­ing ser­vice, which re­port­ed on Thurs­day a to­tal of 269.6 mil­lion sub­scrip­tions world­wide at the end of March, 2024. But Prescod, a telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions con­sul­tant, said a con­ser­v­a­tive es­ti­mate of the num­ber of T&T house­holds sub­scrib­ing to Net­flix could eas­i­ly ex­ceed 200,000.

“Giv­en broad­band pen­e­tra­tion is 94 per cent, ac­cord­ing to the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T, and con­ser­v­a­tive­ly as­sum­ing even 50 per cent are Net­flix sub­scribers, that means the num­ber of sub­scribers could be 200,000 (based on 410,000 house­holds),” said Prescod. No­tably, Ja­maica’s sub­scrip­tion num­ber was said to be 150,000 in 2022.

Prescod based his cal­cu­la­tion of the pen­e­tra­tion of Net­flix in T&T on the premise that ev­i­dence sug­gests that most of the house­holds that have broad­band ac­cess are ac­cess­ing these stream­ing ser­vices.

“Broad­band pen­e­tra­tion is dri­ven by stream­ing ser­vices, in­deed the ma­jor op­er­a­tors of­fer stream­ing ser­vice sub­scrip­tions with their pack­ages” he told Sun­day Busi­ness on Fri­day, adding that some high-in­come house­holds have more than two.

Prescod said that Prime, Dis­ney +, Hu­lu, Max and Para­mount are al­so avail­able to lo­cal sub­scribers and these stream­ing ser­vices could at­tract an­oth­er 100,000 T&T house­holds.

Based on his con­ser­v­a­tive es­ti­mate of 200,000 Net­flix sub­scrip­tions in T&T, and at a cur­rent price of US$12.99 a month, Prescod is com­fort­able with his es­ti­mate that T&T spends US$31,176,000 (TT$208 mil­lion) a year to ac­cess Net­flix se­ries, movies and doc­u­men­taries. The five oth­er stream­ing ser­vices pop­u­lar in T&T would mean ad­di­tion­al ex­trac­tion of for­eign ex­change.

He al­so not­ed that none of the stream­ing ser­vices are reg­is­tered as busi­ness­es in T&T, so they pay no tax­es on these earn­ings.

Glob­al tech gi­ants

dom­i­nate us­age

The pop­u­lar­i­ty of stream­ing ser­vices in T&T is borne out by da­ta pro­vid­ed by lo­cal telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion com­pa­nies.

Ac­cord­ing to da­ta pro­vid­ed by Am­plia, in Feb­ru­ary 2024 al­most 50 per cent of its in­ter­net traf­fic was com­mand­ed by three ma­jor play­ers in glob­al tech: Google, Net­flix and Face­book.

Google, which owns YouTube, com­mand­ed 16.5 per cent of the traf­fic, with Net­flix slight­ly be­hind at 16 per cent while Face­book, with 15 per cent, trailed.

Com­bined, these three, con­sid­ered part of the big six tech com­pa­nies, were re­spon­si­ble for 47 per cent of the traf­fic utilised by Am­plia cus­tomers for Feb­ru­ary.

There was a sim­i­lar pat­tern in Jan­u­ary 2024, as these sites were once again the three largest con­sumers of band­width by Am­plia cus­tomers, How­ev­er in that month they ac­count­ed for 48.2 per cent of the traf­fic, with Google/YouTube ac­count­ing for 17 per cent with Net­flix and Face­book both ac­count­ing for 15.6 per cent.

The num­bers for De­cem­ber hit 51 per cent as Am­plia cus­tomers upped their stream­ing dur­ing the Christ­mas pe­ri­od with Google/YouTube see­ing 18.7 per cent of in­ter­net traf­fic, with Net­flix not far be­hind with 18.3. Face­book re­mained third in con­sump­tion with 14 per cent.

How­ev­er while Google/YouTube and Face­book/Meta are con­nect­ed to mul­ti­ple sites and so­cial me­dia plat­forms, Net­flix is geared to­wards video stream­ing in par­tic­u­lar.

Am­plia con­firmed that through­out the three months, Net­flix us­age large­ly peaked in the evening hours of 8 pm and 10 pm, with the typ­i­cal peak us­age of Net­flix be­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 28Gbps.

Am­plia said peak us­age and peak us­age time were con­sis­tent across all three months.

When con­tact­ed, Dig­i­cel was un­able to pro­vide sim­i­lar de­tailed num­bers con­cern­ing con­sump­tion pat­terns on its broad­band ser­vice Dig­i­cel+. How­ev­er, the com­pa­ny said “ap­prox­i­mate­ly six per cent of the mo­bile da­ta traf­fic on our net­work is due to Net­flix.”

Dig­i­cel said, “How­ev­er, we are fair­ly cer­tain that on the fixed broad­band side (Dig­i­cel+) it would be high­er than this as most cus­tomers con­sume Net­flix on their home TVs us­ing their fixed con­nec­tions. Un­for­tu­nate­ly we do not have the em­pir­i­cal da­ta on fixed broad­band.”

Net­flix’s con­tin­ued dom­i­nance of lo­cal in­ter­net us­age has come just a few years af­ter there were con­cerns that the undis­put­ed king of stream­ing might have fi­nal­ly lost its crown amid the surge of new ser­vices name­ly Dis­ney +, HBO Max (now just Max), Ap­ple TV, Prime Video, Para­mount and Pea­cock.

This slip­page was ex­pect­ed to be in­ten­si­fied when Net­flix an­nounced price in­creas­es and a sub­se­quent crack­down on pass­word shar­ing last year.

How­ev­er in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, Net­flix could on­ly claim to be sec­ond to one oth­er stream­ing plat­form last year, the still large­ly free to the pub­lic YouTube.

T&T stayed in line with glob­al trends as Net­flix is eas­i­ly the most pop­u­lar sub­scrip­tion stream­ing ser­vice be­ing used in the coun­try. Un­like Dis­ney+ and Max, there is no tie-in op­tion or arrange­ment for lo­cal ca­ble providers to bun­dle ser­vices with the stream­ing plat­form.

Lo­cal ca­ble providers Flow and Dig­i­cel both re­ceived back­lash for rais­ing their prices in the past few years, but Net­flix has al­so in­creased its sub­scrip­tion cost in the past year and has hint­ed that there may be an­oth­er in­crease on the way.

No­tably, Net­flix prices are not uni­form across the board, in 2023 the com­pa­ny dropped the prices of sub­scrip­tions in over 30 coun­tries to main­tain its sub­scrip­tion num­bers.

While one such coun­try which ben­e­fit­ted from this de­ci­sion was our Cari­com neigh­bour Ja­maica, which saw sub­scrip­tion cost drop to US$5, T&T’s sub­scrip­tion cost re­mained at $12.99 per month.

The price in T&T is still some way off from the most ex­pen­sive sub­scrip­tion cost in the Caribbean, which is cur­rent­ly held by the US Vir­gin Is­lands at US$15.49 and Bar­ba­dos at US$15.29.

Re­gion­al tele­coms

want ‘Fair Share’

Net­flix’s sub­scrip­tion mod­el, ab­sent the ties seen by Dis­ney+ and Max to lo­cal providers, un­der­lined one of the con­cerns raised by the C9 that the com­pa­ny ben­e­fits from us­ing lo­cal re­sources with lit­tle re­turn.

The C9 is a CAN­TO Work­ing Group of Caribbean telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions op­er­a­tors ad­vo­cat­ing for Fair Share, as the group is con­cerned that while these com­pa­nies have con­sis­tent­ly been reap­ing fi­nan­cial ben­e­fits in the re­gion, re­gion­al telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works are see­ing lit­tle to no re­turns from them.

The C9 com­pris­es ATN In­ter­na­tion­al, Be­lize Tele­me­dia Ltd (BTL), Ca­ble Ba­hamas, Dig­i­cel, Guyana Tele­phone and Tele­graph Com­pa­ny (GTT), Lib­er­ty Latin Amer­i­ca, Telesur, The Ca­ble in St Kitts, and Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of T&T (TSTT).

Ear­li­er this year, chair of the C9 com­mit­tee Lisa Agard, re­vealed that in 2023, the big six glob­al tech com­pa­nies—Al­pha­bet (Google), Meta, Ap­ple, Ama­zon, Tik­Tok and Net­flix—earned a com­bined to­tal of US$11.5 bil­lion in the Caribbean.

A Net­flix sub­scrip­tion in Trinidad would re­quire the use of for­eign ex­change, as the en­ti­ty does not have a lo­cal arm which fa­cil­i­tates pay­ments.

Agard con­firmed to Guardian Me­dia that dur­ing her stint as TSTT CEO, Am­plia ap­proached Net­flix to part­ner with them so that lo­cal sub­scribers could pay the lo­cal telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny TT to ob­tain a Net­flix sub­scrip­tion. Net­flix re­fused the deal, stat­ing that its pen­e­tra­tion in Trinidad and To­ba­go was al­ready high and it did not re­quire such an arrange­ment.

Net­flix and the rest of the big tech com­pa­nies al­so dom­i­nate two-thirds or 67 per cent of the re­gion’s in­ter­net traf­fic and com­mand band­width, which al­so sig­nif­i­cant­ly adds to costs in­curred by re­gion­al providers.

Agard ex­plained then that amid falling rev­enue for telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion op­er­a­tors, this sit­u­a­tion is prob­lem­at­ic. The C9 has con­tin­ued to lob­by for on­go­ing dis­cus­sions to see how they can in­stead get them to in­vest in the re­gion and pay their fair share to en­sure these telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion com­pa­nies can con­tin­ue to pro­vide qual­i­ty ser­vice.

Lo­cal telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions providers had been reel­ing for some time as the rise in stream­ing and OTT ser­vices around the world had sup­plant­ed de­mand for ca­ble ser­vices, while al­so cre­at­ing in­creased de­mand for more in­ter­net band­width at the ex­pense of re­gion­al providers.

The C9’s con­cern is on­ly set to grow giv­en that stream­ing ser­vices con­tin­ue to rise in pop­u­lar­i­ty and are in­deed the pre­ferred method of tele­vi­sion con­sump­tion in the mod­ern day, with even ma­jor sports leagues opt­ing to sign deals with stream­ing plat­forms.