Netflix: Subscriber growth at half mast. What impact on the SVOD service?

news business Netflix: Subscriber growth at half mast. What impact on the SVOD service?

Published on 01/22/2022 at 18:29

But what’s going on at Netflix? Despite the worldwide success of its content, the growth of the video-on-demand platform seems to worry its leaders.

Netflix in numbers

To date, the platform has no fewer than 221.8 million subscribers and announces that it raised $7.7 billion in the last quarter of 2021, making a net profit of $607 million. Netflix also reports registering 8.28 million new subscribers in the same period. The success of the Squid Game series is no stranger, as it alone was watched by 142 million users just a month after its release and also set the record for most subscribers to have watched the series (two-thirds!).

Video game enthusiasts have contributed to the success of the series The Witcher and arcane, each inspired by The Witcher and League of Legends games. If the figures announced by the streaming platform can make you dizzy and its roadmap for this new year shows many enticing projects, the fact remains that the competition is fierce, Netflix regrets an increase in the number of new subscribers slowing down what this is caused by the decline in the group’s stock on the stock exchange, which has lost as much as 20% of its value.

Blame the health crisis again and again?

While admitting they benefited from user availability during lockdowns in 2020 and early 2021, Netflix executives are pointing it out “Retention and audience remain strong, but new subscriber growth has not returned to pre-pandemic levels”, while they indicate that are responsible “Various factors including Covid, which continues to weigh on the economy, and macroeconomic difficulties in various parts of the world, particularly in Latin America”

. Analyst Robert Enderle says:

There’s nothing wrong with Netflix, they just face increasingly aggressive competition. Therefore, it becomes more difficult for them to stand out and attract the public.

In any case, Netflix’s reaction to these results seems to be to increase its prices, which could also be caused by the increase in the platform’s content production costs. Limited to the United States for now, this increase brings the base rate to $9.99 while the maximum rate reaches $19.99. It is very likely that this price increase will be applied to the rest of the world soon.

Source : 20 minutes