Newsletter
At CES 2016, Netflix made the announcement of their global expansion. The service would become available in 130 additional countries all over the world, leaving out only a handful of countries because of their particular regulations. The company announced its earnings for last year’s fourth quarter, collecting $1.823 billion in revenue and $43 million in profit.
Netflix is offered on several platforms including Smart TVs, mobile devices and PCs, additionally, besides offering feature films and TV shows, Netflix creates original content with such famous titles as “House of Cards” or “Orange is the New Black” to compete with services such as HBO, Hulu and Amazon, among others. The content is already shown in many languages, but with the international expansion, more languages are expected to be added soon. The amount of such content has grown over the years, the company invested under $6 billion in 2012 and last year, investment in original content reached $10 million. This year, the company plans to add over 30 new original titles and 30 children’s programs.
The company also reported that they had a significant subscriber growth in the fourth quarter. Netflix broke its record and added 5.59 million new subscribers in the fourth quarter, 1.56 million were from the U.S. and 4.04 million were from other countries. This totals up to more than 75 million subscribers. It’s easy to see that streaming services in the U.S. are already saturating the market while internationally there’s significant growth in terms of subscribers due to the lack of these kinds of services. The number of subscribers could potentially grow in the next quarterly report as the given number doesn’t include the additional countries where Netflix is now available. Still, the service might be priced a little too high for some countries where the income is not as high as the one in the U.S. because Netflix will continue to offer their services at similar prices everywhere. Rival companies and broadcasters could join forces for content exclusivity, which could take away a few subscribers from Netflix. It has also been reported that Netflix could be building a universal catalogue so that content can be watched anywhere, which could also attract some users as many countries get only a small percentage of the catalogue from the U.S.