I agree that it most likely is some sort of licensing issue which prevents the same content. But Netflix isn't paying for Cinema Paradiso, or Braveheart, or Zootopia, or … in Sweden. In fact the Swedish library is less than half the size of the US library[1]. Yet Swedish consumers pay just as much as US consumers. There is a large discrepancy in the value given for customers' money here which Netflix does not address.

    [1] http://cordcutting.com/how-many-titles-are-available-on-netflix-in-your-country/

And, no doubt, there is a fixed overhead of dealing with with Swedish customers that is spread out over far fewer consumers than in the US.

What kind of overhead, specifically, would that be?

Swedes speak to the same english-only customer service representatives as US customers do. And CDN cost should scale mostly linearly with the size of the customer base.

License dealings are often per-country, and there are different exclusive deals in different countries which prevent anyone else from offering some film or show on their streaming platform. There's a lot of legal overhead per country, unfortunately.

>"There's a lot of legal overhead per country, unfortunately." //

Which it's worth remembering is entirely self-imposed by the industry.

Why, if Netflix comes along and says "we want to give you more money by showing this media to Swedes too" do the media conglomerates not fallover themselves to make it happen. It needs a couple of checkboxes on a form somewhere.

>> do the media conglomerates not fallover themselves to make it happen

Apparently they are not willing to do so for their own reasons or their licensing demands are too high for Netflix to sustain their service. I somehow doubt Netflix is turning away licensed content because they don't want to make money from that content.

I'm not arguing in favour of the status quo, but merely trying to explain it. I completely agree that the current situation isn't very good---neither for consumers nor (probably) content right holders.

I doubt it, they'd sell it at higher cost because in other countries there are often few alternatives.

Shows established in the USA become part of the global culture, USA is very good at exporting its culture. Once established, in order for people in other countries to buy in to that culture then exported media can be sold at higher value.

This is one of the reasons for regional encoding. You don't want to let outsiders buy in to something that's established as cool