Netflix has now has more than 200 million subscribers after reporting its financials yesterday after subscribers remaining at home during the pandemic assisted it with accomplishing a record year of development in 2020.
The streaming giant, which started its operations in 2007, said it added a better-than-anticipated 8.5 million new paying users in the last quarter of the year to arrive at 203.7 million.
For the year overall, Netflix added 37 million new subscribers most of which came from the first quarter when it said it added 15.8 million subscribers beating all forecast and yes again that was when people began staying at home. But Netflix didn’t fail the subscribers too as it kept churning out new movie and releases, while revenue rose 24% to $25bn and profits climbed 48% to $2.76bn.
Netflix had some big shows last year like Tiger King, Queen’s Gambit, The Crown and Shonda Rhime’s Bridgerton.
In a statement by the company, “incredibly difficult year” it had been “able to provide our members around the world with a source of escape, connection and joy while continuing to build our business”.
The vast majority of the development – 83% of new subscribers came from outside its home market of the US and Canada. A further 6,000,000 are projected to join the platform in the first quarter of this year.
Netflix shares rose almost 13% at the close of trading yesterday and the big news is that they won’t be needing loans to build the business any longer. They said they won’t be borrowing billions to finance its shows and movies for now. They even went on to say it should be a good time for shareholders as it is thinking about returning money to shareholders.
Disney Plus which started about a year ago now has over 87 million subscribers and even the co-chief executive Reed Hastings of Netflix described it as impressive. He acknowledged that this put them on their toes to getting more subscribers.
A report from Digital TV Research says by 2025, Netflix is likely to be in the lead with 235.6 million subscribers, Amazon Prime Video is expected to come in second with a projected 135.9 million subscribers. Not too surprising though is the new Disney Plus coming third place with an estimated 101.2 million subscribers by 2025. HBO Max and Apple TV+ comes in at 30.1 million and 27.1 million respectively.
