Netflix in South Africa is great value for money

The price of Netflix Standard in South Africa offers good value for money compared to other countries.

Netflix’s catalogue varies from one country to the next because content licences are negotiated per country or region.

Where the video streaming service might have the rights to stream one movie in South Africa, those rights could belong to another service in the United States, for example.

In addition, Netflix’s monthly prices differ between countries as the cost to operate and license content in each territory differs.

MyBroadband compared the library sizes and monthly subscription prices of the world’s biggest streaming service in South Africa and 19 other countries to see where a Netflix plan offered the best value for money.

We primarily chose countries that are popular for emigration among South Africans and popular holiday destinations. In Africa, we also focused on other major markets for Netflix.

To establish the library sizes in each country, we used JustWatch.com.

When it comes to pure title numbers, subscribers in the United Kingdom were getting the best deal at the time of our comparison.

The country’s library had 7,765 titles, 100 more than 2nd-placed Germany and over 400 more than 3rd-placed France.

South Africa placed 12th with 6,458 titles, around 1,300 less than the UK but still a respectable number when looking at some of the countries further down the list.

Specifically, subscribers in other African countries had a fairly limited content selection.

Nigerian and Kenyan Netlfix subscribers only had 2,209 and 2,170 titles in their libraries, respectively.

The worst off was Zambia, with just 1,537 titles.

The table below ranks the Netflix libraries of the 20 countries we compared from biggest to smallest.

When it comes to value for money, the ranking looks completely different, with South Africa in a much better position.

Egypt — which only had the 14th-largest catalogue — placed first due to its low subscription fee and decent library size of 6,443 titles.

With a monthly price of 120 Egyptian pounds for Netflix standard, subscribers in the North African country are paying 1.16 cents per title.

Argentinians and Indians also get good value for money, paying 1.53 cents and 1.72 cents per title.

South Africa was not far off, with a price-per-title of 2.46 cents based on its Netflix Standard price of R159 per month and 6,458 titles.

Zambia was the only country that kept its place between the two rankings.

The fact that the country’s subscribers have to pay in US dollars puts their price near South Africa’s, but with their much smaller library, the cost per title works out to 9.88 cents.

That is over double the amount paid by the country with the second-worst value for money in this comparison — Israel.

Other African countries like Nigeria and Kenya also had much better prices per title, at 3.62 cents and 3.76 cents, respectively.

Their localised pricing was about half the Zambian and South African subscription prices at the time of publication.

The table below ranks the 20 countries we compared from best to worst in terms of the prices per title in their Netflix libraries.