The continuous bleeding of revenue from the country by streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon Prime is a major concern for Fiji.

The revenue earned by the paid streaming sites is swallowed up totally by them without any tax or tax on profit mechanisms in place.

However, this could be set for a change as the Fijian government could soon follow the model of its neighbour Australia.

Minister for Communications, Manoa Kamikamica says the issue of losing out to streaming giants has struck discord in the government coffers, and a switch of rules could soon be on the list.

“I mean, the decision should be something that the Cabinet needs to look at.” “But it is very interesting, in terms of trying to create a tax structure to extract the rightful source of income, that taxpayers are paying this money, and nothing is coming back to the government.”

Recently, Australia announced plans to impose legislation that requires operators such as Netflix to invest 20% of their revenue in making local content.

The minister says that online platforms such as Netflix are becoming the frontier of economic activity.

Communication Minister, Manoa Kamikamica. 

This year alone, Asia-Pacific added a net 1.46 million paid subscribers to Netflix, accounting for 83% of the worldwide total net growth of 1.75 million.

Asia-Pacific has also contributed $934 million in revenue in the first three quarters of this year.

Kamikamica says Fiji knows very well the benefits of digital revenue.

“These, particularly operators like Netflix, are sort of the new frontier for economic activity.” “You don’t have to be based in a country to provide service, and that will become more and more common, so it will be interesting to see what Australia has done in that regard.”

Telecom, which hosts the content servers for Netflix, says it is not privy to any details of revenue or subscriptions.

In a statement, the Telco says their partnership with Netflix is solely for hosting their content servers in their data centre and providing connectivity between the local Netflix servers and other Netflix content servers globally for real-time content updates and downloads.

Telecom is not the local provider of Netflix content.

All content provided by Netflix is owned and managed by Netflix.

Therefore, they are unable to comment on customer subscriptions, trends, or revenue generated for Netflix.

Telecom says that regarding the proposed Australia-like legislation to impose regulations on Netflix and other content providers in Fiji, it is up to the regulators to determine the potential implications of such regulations.

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