by Tech Talk | Feb 24, 2023 | Articles
Netflix has cut prices of its subscription plans in some countries as the streaming giant looks to maintain subscriber growth amid stiff competition and strained consumer spending. The shares fell 3.3%.
The past year has seen intense competition in the streaming industry as a pandemic-driven boom fades and consumers curtail spending over fears of a possible recession, forcing companies to rethink their strategies.
According to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, the price cuts took place in some countries in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa (including Kenya), Latin America and Asia. South Africa is not among them.
The cuts apply to certain tiers of Netflix in those markets — in some cases, the cost of a subscription was halved, the Journal reported.
Netflix, which operates in more than 190 countries, has been looking to grow its share in newer international regions as the US and Canadian markets saturate. Earlier this month, it laid out plans to crack down on password sharing for accounts on its streaming platform.
The company added about 7.6 million subscribers in the fourth quarter after bleeding subscribers in the first half of 2022 as rivals such as Paramount+ and Disney+ raked in subscribers.
But average revenue per membership declined across regions in the last three months of 2022.
“We’re always exploring ways to improve our members’ experience. We can confirm that we are updating the pricing of our plans in certain countries,” a spokesman for the company said.
TechCentral has established that the price cuts in the sub-Saharan African region apply only to countries where the service is charged in US dollars rather than in local currency. — Reuters – NewsCentral Media
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by Tech Talk | Oct 19, 2022 | Articles
Netflix Inc. is growing again, and Hollywood can breathe a sigh of relief.
The streaming leader added 2.41 million customers in the third quarter, exceeding internal forecasts as well as expectations on Wall Street.
Netflix grew in all regions of the world and said in a shareholder letter on Tuesday that it expects to sign up another 4.5 million globally this period.
While Netflix isn’t growing as quickly it was a couple of years ago, the world’s most popular TV network is back on a positive trajectory.
More customers are signing up than earlier in the year, the company said Tuesday.
That’s good news for investors in Netflix and its peers who suffered steep stock-market losses earlier in the year.
“Thank God we’re done with shrinking quarters,” co-founder and Chairman Reed Hastings said during a webcast interview with analyst Doug Anmuth.
Shares of Netflix rose as much as 16% to $278.94 in extended trading after the results were out.
The stock was down 60% this year through the close Tuesday in New York. Other streaming companies, such as Roku Inc. and Walt Disney Co., also rose.
A strong slate of fresh programs attracted millions of new viewers in the third quarter.
The period started with new episodes of Stranger Things, one of the most popular TV series in the world.
Netflix also released the Korean smash hit Extraordinary Attorney Woo, the movies The Gray Man and Purple Hearts, and the true crime drama Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, its second-most-popular English-language original series.
Revenue for the quarter grew 5.9% to $7.93 billion, beating analysts’ projections.
Profit of $3.10 a share also topped estimates, and the number of paying customers increased to 223.1 million.
It won’t be all rosy going forward. Netflix is still on pace for the slowest growth in years.
The company lost 1.2 million customers during the first half of the year — a decline that led investors and peers to reconsider their streaming investments.
Its customer base has shrunk in the US this year.
The soaring dollar is taking a bite out of revenue and earnings.
While Netflix said it can adjust content spending and pricing accordingly, its forecast for fourth-quarter sales and profit fell short of Wall Street estimates.
The company estimates sales of $7.78 billion this quarter, below the $7.98 billion forecast by analysts.
Earnings are expected to come in at 36 cents a share, a fraction of the $1.20 estimated on Wall Street.
“We’re still not growing a fast as we’d like,” Chief Financial Officer Spencer Neumann said in the same interview.
Nonetheless, Hastings and Ted Sarandos, the company’s co-chief executive officers, argue Netflix has plenty of room to grow.
The service accounts for about 8% of TV viewing in the US and UK, two of its largest markets, and is adding market share every year, the company said in the letter.
Netflix is also profitable, unlike the streaming services operated by most rivals.
Management plans to increase sales by introducing an advertising-supported version of the streaming service in November and charging for password sharing next year.
Customers willing to watch Netflix with five minutes of advertising per hour can pay $7 a month, less than half of the cost of the most-popular plan.
A lower-priced tier could help Netflix reduce the number of people canceling service or appeal to new customers in markets where growth has slowed.
As viewership of linear TV falls off a cliff, Netflix also argued it would capture billions of dollars in sales once earmarked for live TV channels.
While investors have long judged Netflix based on the number of customers it adds every quarter, the company is trying to get them to consider more traditional financial metrics like revenue and operating income.
As a result, Netflix said it will no longer provide subscriber forecasts.
Editor@tech-talk.co.za
by Tech Talk | Sep 28, 2022 | Articles
Netflix is creating its first in-house videogames studio in a push to be less reliable on third-party creators and expand its gaming offerings.
The new studio will be based in Helsinki and headed by Marko Lastikka, according to a statement from Netflix on Monday. Lastikka previously spent more than five years at Zynga, where he worked on FarmVille 3, and before that was the co-founder and executive producer at Electronic Arts’ Tracktwenty studio in Helsinki, according to his LinkedIn page.
“This is another step in our vision to build a world-class games studio that will bring a variety of delightful and deeply engaging original games — with no ads and no in-app purchases — to our hundreds of millions of members around the world,” Amir Rahimi, vice president of game studios at Neflix, said in the statement.
The new games studio will be Netflix’s fourth overall, after the company acquired another Helsinki-based studio, Next Games, and Boss Fight Entertainment, earlier this year. Netflix brought on Night School Studio in September 2021.
Netflix currently has 31 mobile games in its catalogue, which are free of ads and in-app purchases but only available to subscribers. The company plans to have 50 games available by the end of the year. That includes the Next Games-developed Stranger Things: Puzzle Games, which is based on the platform’s hit show and will soon be exclusive to Netflix.
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