Netflix USA vs The World: Content libraries compared

Ever since it expanded out from its original US base, the Netflix story has been much the same. That is, the US library dwarfing that of any of its expansion territories thanks to differing rights management for the streaming content it delivers.

While it would be tempting to assume that Netflix simply applied a single global library to all its new territories, it turns out this isn’t the case, with huge variance in terms of the number of titles available across each location primarily based on your IP address.

Access to Netflix isn’t just a pure numbers game because it will always depend on what it is you want to watch and the specific rights the platform holds in each territory. That doesn’t even extend to Netflix Originals series, where (for example) in Hong Kong, Netflix didn’t previously stream House Of Cards (although it does now).

In a sheer numbers sense, we’ve compiled data on every available Netflix territory for its Movie and TV offerings where that data is available. You can sort each column depending on your taste in movies or TV to see how each country compares to the mammoth US library.

Are there easy winners or losers? Predictably, US territories score well in comparative terms against the US itself, with the surprise winners in the movie stakes being Martinique and Equatorial Guinea respectively.

Average net speeds in Equatorial Guinea are only 1.164Mbps downstream, however, so it seems likely that the majority of that library will only be streamed in standard definition.

The two worst countries to access Netflix in globally would be Morocco and Albania, neither of which crack 50 available TV titles; Morocco additionally has the lowest number of available movies from countries we’ve yet been able to assess.