Netflix USA vs The World: Content libraries compared

Netflix has launched worldwide, and we’ve perused every available Netflix library to see how they compare.

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

Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings announced at CES 2016 this week that Netflix had flipped the switch on immediate global availability, excluding China, Crimea, Syria and North Korea. China is tricky due to government regulation, while Crimea, Syria and North Korea are excluded due to US government trade restrictions.

We’ve perused every available Netflix library globally to extract the precise number of movie and TV titles available in each territory. While it would be tempting to assume that Netflix simply applied a single global library to all its new territories, it turns out that this isn’t the case, with huge variance in terms of the number of titles available across each location.

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 Netflix holds in each territory. That doesn’t even extend to Netflix Originals series, where (for example) in Hong Kong, Netflix doesn’t stream House Of Cards due presumably to the rights having already been assigned to another broadcaster.

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 fifty available TV titles; Morocco additionally has the lowest number of available movies from countries we’ve yet been able to assess.

You can check through our list of Netflix titles available by country here, and check the availability of titles on a global map here.