Real-life House of Cards and Games of Thrones are not enough for Croatian users.
Biljana Borzan, a Croatian member of the European Parliament, has sent a question to the European Commission related to discrimination of Croatian consumers by the Netflix video streaming service. Shortly after the introduction of Netflix in Croatia, Borzan, who is a member of the Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection of the European Parliament, was contacted by consumers who complained about the quality of content on America’s most popular service for online media content streaming, reports Večernji List on February 28, 2016.
“Consumers often complain that they do not have access to some of the most popular TV series, which were the reason why they subscribed to Netflix, like House of Cards, Game of Thrones or Walking Dead. It is widely known that in the United States, where the service is slightly cheaper, Netflix offers many movies and TV shows which are not available in all EU member states”, said Borzan.
Since representatives of Netflix regularly participate in discussions with the European Commission and the European Parliament on the regulation of the digital market, Borzan sent a question to the Commission, demanding that the discrimination against Croatian consumers should be ended as soon as possible.
Croatian consumers pay for Netflix as much as consumers elsewhere in the EU who have available a wider range of content which is subtitled in their own local language, said Borzan who proposed several amendments to the Act on the Single Digital Market and to the Strategy for the Single EU Market.
Discrimination on grounds of nationality and place of residence is the most common problem for consumers in the online market. When making purchases on the internet, 75 percent of consumers feel discriminated by their place of residence. And 24 percent of EU households do not have access to some online content. According to research done by the European Commission, it is estimated that the cost to consumers when purchasing digital content amounts to around 64 billion euros per year.
