If Netflix wants to keep doing business in Russia it’ll have to jump through some pretty big hoops
Netflix has to adhere to all kinds of different regulations and licensing deals around the world, which is why your Netflix catalogue will look a lot different than usually when you’re travelling internationally. While some economic areas like the EU are only looking into requiring foreign streaming services to serve some percentage of locally produced content, others are a lot stricter. It looks like you can count Russia as one of these stricter regulators, as the country is looking to require Netflix to become something it’s never been before: A live TV streaming service serving customers at least 20 state TV channels from March 2022.
According to The Moscow Times (via WinFuture), Russia’s internet and TV regulatory authority Roskomnadzor has added the US service to its so-called “audio-visual services” register on Tuesday. Services on this list are required to show at least 20 state TV channels in their portfolio, including news TV station NTV, general interest main station Channel One, and the Russian-Orthodox Church’s Spas (“Saved”) station, with critics saying that these and more channels are frequently used for pro-government propaganda purposes. These requirements come into effect starting March 2022.
The regulations will also force the company to register a new Russian subsidiary within the country. Perhaps more significantly, Netflix will also have to follow provisions that ban the promotion of “extremism,” which is a restriction that, according to critics, has mostly been used to make the oppositions’ communication more difficult.
Of course, these regulations only apply to Russia, so Netflix can continue its usual program in other parts of the world. It remains to be seen if the company is willing to put up with the restrictions or if it will pull out of the country in response, if that’s even economically feasible. If it does follow the new rules, it would be interesting to see if Netflix will use the underlying livestreaming technology to serve TV channels in other markets, too. Its live TV experiments in France could be a good foundation and show that the company is very much interested in the concept — though it would probably prefer to serve its own content.
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