Netflix has 6 million subscribers worldwide
At the end of May, Netflix announced that it was now really going to put an end to account sharing. Netflix has been around for a while on the streaming scene and has become part of many people’s daily vocabulary. Sharing your Netflix password was the most normal thing in the world for many. Netflix itself once promoted the idea of sharing your password. With the increasingly fierce competition in streaming land, ever higher production costs and the “need” to convince shareholders that “line go up”, this is now apparently coming to an end.
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A total of 238 subscribers worldwide
Over the past three months, Netflix says it has added almost six million users. That brings the global total to an impressive 238 million subscribers. Precise subscriber numbers are not regularly published by the major platforms. But such numbers in all likelihood still put Netflix ahead of all competitors. Netflix’s biggest competitor, Amazon Prime, had at least 200 million subscribers at the end of last year.
The six million extra users were counted over the months of April, May and June. It was only towards the end of that period that Netflix began notifying subscribers that account sharing was no longer allowed. The effect of this measure will certainly continue to have an effect in the coming period. In addition, not all new subscribers will have taken out a subscription because of this measure.
Sharing means paying
Of course it is still possible to share your account with someone watching from a different IP address, but you have to pay for that privilege. Netflix now offers this option in more than a hundred countries. According to Netflix, revenues have increased in all these countries after the introduction of the sharing option. The influx of new subscribers is therefore greater than the number of people who have pulled the plug on their subscription because of the measure.
Spencer Neumann, Netflix’s CFO, said the launch of paid account sharing was the biggest driver of revenue growth this year. “Most of the growth this year will come from new paid subscriptions and that is mainly driven by the introduction of paid account sharing.” said Neumann.
Big Trouble in Little Hollywood
The good news is not a moment too late for Netflix. The big movie studios are in conflict with their writers and actors. The unions are on strike and there seems to be no obvious solution. Streaming is at the center of this conflict. Writers and actors get paid up front for their time, but unless you’re a big name, royalty income is required to keep you afloat. The cost of living in the entertainment centers of the US is crazy high.
Because streaming is different from TV and the cinema, there are different wage conditions. Writers and actors are usually fairly paid out of royalties from TV reruns and the like. But after the work is done, they see virtually nothing of the capital their labor generates on services like Netflix.
Another dislike is the use of “AI”. By using this technology it will be possible in the future to take a lot of work off the hands of writers and actors. As a result, derivative and deadly boring work, but the studios will not be interested in that. Add to that the fact that such technology is fed by the work of real people, often without payment, and you understand that the unions see reason to sound the alarm.
Possibly a lot less content
There seems to be no end in sight for the strike. This means that new streaming content may take some time to arrive. Since new content is one of the drivers of new subscribers, it is likely that Netflix will also be affected by the strikes. “The point is that we need to end these strikes as soon as possible so that we can all move forward.” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said of the strikes.
The markets already felt that the results of the past quarter were not sufficient. Shares of Netflix fell 4% on the day of the announcement. Netflix wants to generate 7% more income this quarter compared to last year. In total, that amounts to 8.5 billion dollars. That is already less than the 8.7 billion initially expected.
