[pipo234]

On one hand, I don't think levying OTT fees make much as telcos ought to have been already paid for the bandwidth.

On the other, I also think OTT companies, and in particular VOD companies like Netflix really have no reason to rely on undersea cables in the first place. Simply put: neither netflix, nor any of their customers are located underwater and 99% of their offering is static content. Which means that distribution necessarily relies on CDNs and it's in everyone's interest (Netflix, the telcos and the customer) to access the copy located nearest to the viewer.

So in principle, content should never be delivered to customers using undersea cables and indeed this typically happens only when people use a VPN (to bypass somewhat silly IP licensing restrictions designed by the content owners).

[toast0]

Netflix needs underseas cables (well, transoceanic links) to serve the critical dynamic content / account state keeping and also to transfer content to CDN nodes. The catalog of content changes regularly.