There was talk earlier on in the year that Netflix, the US-based online movie streaming company would launch into a new market by the end of the year. We’ve been looking forward to Netflix launching in Australia for years and pine for it everyday, so when we heard it was expanding outside of the Americas, we all sat up in our collective chairs. Sadly, though, it’s not going to be us that gets it.
Instead of launching in Australia in 2012, Netflix has today announced that it would be launching in the Nordic states of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden before the year is out.
If we play it by the numbers, Australia still has a smaller population than the four countries combined, but not by much. There’s only about three million people in it. But this isn’t a numbers game, it’s about geographies rather than population size. Netflix is clearly more interesting in building a European user base rather than a user base in the Australasian region. It already has service available in the UK and in Ireland, so expanding to mainland Europe seems sensible from a business perspective.
Still won’t stop us pouting though. [Netflix via TechCrunch]