Netflix And Chill In Africa? It Might Cost You A Lot And Not Be Worth It

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Netflix announced that they were going global. Netflix is now going to be available in almost every country except China.

Those countries will also include African countries like Ghana and Nigeria.

Being in Ghana, I can’t help but wonder how I’m going to able to stream Netflix especially when you consider how bad and expensive are internet service providers are.

Let’s try to break down the cost:

Vodafone Ghana offers broadband services which run you from 85GHC and upwards. The lowest price is 85GHC which only gives you 20GB of data. The highest is 400GHC which gives you 500GB which is the best price for streaming. When you really consider it, can the average Ghanaian afford 500GB a month to stream Netflix. Or maybe they can go for the next highest price which is 200GB for 250GHC a month.

In the US, a basic price can cost you about $35/month and your data is capped at 300GB.

Do the math. By comparison, if you apply the foreign exchange rate, you should be paying for 300GB at 140GHC ($35 x 4).

So is Netflix worth it? Not at these prices. If you even go for 4G LTE services, you’re going to be paying a lot more for streaming. Most Ghanaians at the moment would rather download their shows and movies and watch rather than stream. A TV show series can usually take about 2GB to download. Watching movies or TV shows on Netflix uses about 1 GB of data per hour for each stream of standard definition video, and up to 3 GB per hour for each stream of HD video.

So isn’t it better to just download and watch than stream?

At this point, until internet prices come down and Ghanaian ISPs get better, you might want to look at downloading than streaming. I think the same can be said for other developing African countries.

Your Netflix and chill nights are better off with download and chill nights.