 Welcome to the World Telecommunications Development Conference here in Kigali, Rwanda, and we're in the ITU studio here, and I've got the great pleasure today of being joined by Thomas Vollmer, who is a global head of content delivery policy for Netflix. Thomas, welcome to the studio. Thank you, Max, for having me. Now, I'd like to get straight into it. We have just had two and a half days of partner to connect sessions, global round tables. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about being involved in those, and then maybe tell us a little bit about the pledge that you made this morning. Sure, yeah, we announced our pledge this morning in the first session of the day. What a great way to start the day. The theme of this year's conference is Connecting the Unconnected. I think the ITU evaluates almost three billion people on the planet still not connected. Obviously, connecting the unconnected is a huge task, a huge objective that no organisation can achieve by itself. So we came here and joined the coalition to contribute. We're an entertainment company. We believe great stories can come from anywhere and be enjoyed everywhere. And so we rely on an open internet for our members to enjoy our stories. Our pledge is about that, about contributing to that open internet. We have pledged to partner with internet exchange points, with data centre providers in unconnected communities to deploy caching servers, servers that host and store and deliver the Netflix content. And so to give you an example, if you're sitting in your room today or later tonight in Kigali and you want to download the latest season of Stranger Things, the stream will actually come from Kigali, from a server locally deployed as part of our Open Connect program. So we pledge to do more of this in those underdeveloped communities. We think it's going to help drive demand for and then the adoption of broadband. It helps reduce costs for ISPs who don't need to build as much network capacity and in the end it just contributes to this chain of essential ICT infrastructure. So better for Netflix and better for the world. And for our members who enjoy better experience, no buffering, you're in the middle of your movie, you don't want it to stop. And then also better for our partners who build the network, internet service providers. What about local content? Are you making efforts to get content here that appeals to the audiences here? We try to get great stories come from anywhere and so literally everywhere. I think up to recently our most successful show was from Asia, Squid Game, massive success. We've invested in content in Africa as well, Blood Sisters from Kenya and then recently a very fun and uplifting pan-African reality show called Young, Famous and African. I really encourage you checking them. Getting back to your pledge, how challenging do you think it will be to achieve that? I think it's about an entire chain clicking together, right? Obviously no single organisation can connect the unconnected. So it's really about all those pieces of infrastructure, the ISPs, the content, the data centres, the exchange points coming together and cooperating in making it happen. And in principle a timeline, would you see some kind of reasonable timeline for this? We're targeting over 100 million people that would get access to content stream locally. We expect to achieve in those communities over 80% of our streams locally. We aim for the next WTDC in four years hopefully. So this is a massive investment so you're obviously taking it very seriously? Right, and I would say beyond the investment is really the impact we hope it will have. So we've been building Open Connect, our network of servers for the past 10 years. It's over a billion dollar investment for Netflix and the value it provides to our ISP partners is commensurate. We think our latest estimates are that it saves ISPs around the world over 1.2 billion dollars every year. You talked about stories coming from all around the world and of course you've got plenty on Netflix. I'm just wondering if there's anything that you might want to share with us while we're here in the studio about the future of Netflix and about how you see the evolution of it. Look, Netflix is dedicated to its goal, entertaining the world for us. It's about making great content, great shows, great movies that people enjoy. You know we compete hard for those moments where we call them moments of joy where people choose to spend their free time with the service. So we're going to double down on that great content, great member experience and we think our pledge Open Connect actually contributes to that. And in principle I'm just looking at thinking about also affordability here in the region. Do you see that as a challenge or would you be offering a certain kind of incentives perhaps in terms of membership or that kind of thing? I'm not holding you to it but I'm just wondering if those are really the kind of things that might be crossing your mind. I mean definitely as I said it's this entire chain of clicking together. The content of course needs to be appealing to the members so that they choose to subscribe or enjoy it but at a more basic level it's about the affordability of the phone. Can you have a smartphone or a TV or a smart TV? Is your home connected? Is the network available? Is the backbone the long distance? Are you in a landlocked community? So it's really about that entire chain. Affordability is definitely one of the main challenges for connecting the unconnected so we think our pledge contributes to that. So by bolstring this up essentially on the entertainment front you could essentially be contributing to a much healthier infrastructure around the region. You create demand. You want to get online to have access to the services that they love. That demand fuels investment which in turn fuels affordability. Thomas, I really look forward to hopefully catching up with you again soon. Maybe earlier than the next WTDC perhaps at another ITU event. Thank you very much for sharing this with us and we very much hope to see it to come to fruition in the very near future. Thank you Max, it's great to be here. Thank you.