In countries where the vaccination drive is running smoothly, economies are opening up and people are going back to work. In other words, in some markets people are spending less time in front of the television. Keeping this as backdrop, Netflix has managed to add another four million subscribers on a net basis globally between January and March, which is lower than the forecast of six million.
“It’s just a little wobbly right now,” Netflix chairman and co-chief executive Reed Hastings has said during a recent call to discuss the company’s results.
But it’s not just people going back to work that has resulted in the poorer-than-expected result, competitors are cutting into the streaming service’s share. On the back of some excellent shows from rival services, the demand for original Netflix programmes, like Bridgerton, has started to drop, according to the data firm Parrot Analytics, which, according to The New York Times, has developed a metric to rate not only the number of viewers for given shows, but their likelihood of attracting subscribers to a streaming service.
Rival services like Walt Disney Co.’s Disney+, which launched around a year and a half ago, already has 100 million subscribers worldwide. Others, like Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video, are also spending massively on new content.
For Netflix, markets outside the US play an important role as far as revenues go. Its growth, for example, in India and Latin America is very important. Hastings has said the company was still “figuring things out” in India in terms of content. “While the roll out of vaccines is very uneven across the world, we are back up and producing safely in every major market, with the exception of Brazil and India,” the company said in a letter to shareholders.
But the real value of Netflix hasn’t taken a beating because it continues to offer the best content out there. Its movies have received 35-plus Oscar nominations this year.