Internet Distribution Business Opportunities

when you want to watch a movie or a tv show,you know what to do. you tap your fingers and within a few secondsyou are watching whatever you want. it's frictionless. it's easy. but in some places, it's not so easy. "there's no other way we don't have foreigntv, it's national tv." officially, there is one source of permitted media incuba. and it's the state. "it's because i don't know what to tell youtell you brother. i just know that's the way it is." but cubans found a way to work around this media blockade

to distribute the latest in global entertainment to the entire country, coordinated entirely by an informal market of underground data traffickers, based both in havana and in the united states. it's the fruits of the internet, without anyof the guts. "one guy will gather tv shows. the other movies.music etc. and that's how they go about collecting media until they have 1 terabyte." once all the latest media from around theworld is gathered onto one hard drive, the top dealers in havana will prepare it for distribution. this extensive collection of digital media is affectionately called 'el paquete semanal' -- the weekly package.

"someone brings it to me. it's from someonewho gets it from someone else who gets it from someone else. in the end it's a chain. it costs about $2and what most people do is fill their flashdrive with the content they want." a quick look into the paquete, and you realizejust how massive the system must be to gather so much content in such a short of time especially in a country that has 5% internetpenetration and agonizingly slow connection speeds. who's behind all this?

i found a couple of 20 year olds who maketheir living hustling havana's streets, participating in the thriving industry of shadowy odd jobs. between driving taxi bikes without a licenseand giving unofficial city tours to european tourists, these guys move the paqeute betweendistributors from time to time. they led me behind the scenes in havana wherei saw how the paquete makes its rounds every week. the distribution centers are usually in theback of a cell phone repair shop or a dvd store. hardware flowing in and out of these placesdoesn't attract unwanted attention.

distributors were not keen on appearing oncamera, but they showed me their operation and explained how clients come to their shopwith a weekly order of content. american tv shows are some of the most demandedcontent, but some people show up with an empty drive every week to transfer the whole thing everything from the iphone app updates tothe indie film section. after poking around, i finally worked my wayup the chain to discover who is coordinating this massive enterprise. they call him dany paquete, and he agreedto meet with me. dany was with a client so i waited for anhour in his impromptu lobby.

i didn't know what to expect dany paqueteto be like. but i definitely did not expect this. he's a 26 year old who was wearing board shortsand not shirt when i arrived. he looked a lot more like an lazy collegesophomore than the king pin of a national black market of pirated media. but after five minutes sitting in his officewith a client in the room, i quickly gained a respect for dany and the media machine heis running. as dany's 40 year old assistant helped loadthe hard drive of a local distributor, i watched a live feed of telemundo digitizing on thescreen.

dany must have an illegal satellite hiddenin a fake water tower on his roof, a fairly common cuban practice. dany's girl friend wandered in and began watchinga discovery channel documentary about a farmer who almost died in a tractor accident in iowa.