Piracy laid the groundwork for Netflix’s launch in Spain, says CEO

As Netflix prepares to launch in Spain this October, the company's CEO Reed Hastings says that the nation's history of rampant piracy has laid the necessary groundwork for Netflix's success. "Well, you can call it a problem, but the truth is that [piracy] has also created a public used to viewing content on the Internet," Hastings told Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

For years, Spain has been a hotbed of piracy. As recently as March, a report said that 2014 was the biggest year ever for piracy in Spain, with 88 percent of all digital content being "obtained illegally." Back in 2012, WikiLeaks released some cables, from the US ambassador to Spain, that showed that Spain almost ended up on a US trade blacklist because it wasn't doing enough to stop file sharing. In 2013, it seemed that Spain managed to get back into US/Hollywood's good book-and finally, in January 2015, Spain finally introduced legislation that required ISPs to block copyright infringing websites.

As the country begins to stamp down on piracy, Netflix is here to save the day. "We offer a simpler and immediate alternative to finding a torrent," Hastings told El Mundo. "In Holland we had a similar situation. It was a country with a high rate of piracy. And the same thing happened in Canada. In both we are a successful service. We can think of this as the bottled water business. Tap water can be drunk and is free, but there is still a public that demands bottled water."

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