A spokesman for Netflix has reportedly confirmed that the online video-on-demand service will be launched in South Africa before the end of next year.

This follows news on Wednesday that the online video pioneer intends aggressively stepping up its international expansion strategy, growing the number of countries in which it operates from 50 to 200 in the next 24 months.

“Our international expansion strategy over the last few years has been to expand as fast as we can while staying profitable on a global basis,” CEO Reed Hastings said in a letter to shareholders on Wednesday.

“Progress has been so strong that we now believe we can complete our global expansion over the next two years, while staying profitable, which is earlier than we expected. We then intend to generate material global profits from 2017 onwards.”

Hastings said Netflix had learnt a great deal about the content people prefer in different markets.

“Acceleration to 200 countries is largely made possible by the tremendous growth of the Internet in
general, including on phones, tablets and smart TVs. We intend to stick to our core ad-free subscription model. As with our initial round of international expansion, we’ll get some things wrong and do our best to fix them quickly.”

On Thursday, media reports said it had received confirmation from Netflix that South Africa was among the countries it intended expanding to.

“We have not provided details of when we plan to go where, but you can be confident South Africa is among the countries we intend to serve sometime in the next two years,” the company reportedly said.

TechCentral was not immediately able to verify the veracity of the statement with Netflix.

Although a number of South African consumers already subscribe to Netflix, they have to use technical trickery or subscribe to virtual private networking services to gain access as is not officially available here. — (c) 2015 NewsCentral Media