Netflix

Netflix added 9.3 million subscribers in the quarter ended March 31, reaching 269.6 million worldwide, and outperformed expectations in other key areas in its latest strong financial report. Revenue and earnings per share both handily exceeded Wall Street forecasts at $9.37 billion and $5.28, respectively. The top line was up 15% from the same quarter in 2023, while EPS came in at nearly double the year-ago period’s $2.88. In its quarterly letter to shareholders, Netflix said it planned to stop reporting subscriber totals and average revenue per subscriber starting with its first quarter results in 2025.

Netflix’s plan to maintain subscriber growth after two quarters of blockbuster increases will be in focus when it reports earnings on Thursday, with some analysts warning that gains from a crackdown on password sharing are set to ease. The streaming pioneer saw its strongest growth since the pandemic in the second half of 2023, with about 22 million people signing up for the service after the company curbed the sharing of passwords globally.

Dan Lin, the streaming service’s new film chief, wants to produce a more varied slate of movies to better appeal to the array of interests among subscribers.

Netflix has landed Rather, the documentary about veteran journalist Dan Rather‘s landmark career in news. The film, which premieres April 24 on the streamer, uses the story of of Rather’s life on television to also explore the evolution of broadcast journalism, the troubles a free press now faces, along with the slide of American society from hard-fought advances in social justice and democratic freedoms.

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, has set two new unscripted series at Netflix via her and Prince Harry’s Archewell Productions banner, which is under an overall deal at the streamer. Though titles and release dates are yet to be announced, both projects are currently in early production.

Around a dozen Netflix employees are leaving after Dan Lin worked on the re-org with Bela Bajaria, outside partners and film heads

Jeff Wlodarczak, principal and senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group, has put out a bullish new report on Netflix that forecasts more subscriber growth and higher average revenue per subscriber. Wlodarczak also boosted his target price for Netflix stock by $65 to $765 a share — among the highest estimates on Wall Street.

Facebook “Watch” looked like a Netflix killer in 2017, but antitrust prosecutors claim it was shut down to protect advertising deals.

Hart rose from the open mics and comedy clubs of his native Philadelphia to become one of his country’s most recognizable performers — honing a signature style that combines his diminutive height, expressive face and motor-mouth delivery into an arena-packing stand-up act. He became the latest recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in a raucous ceremony at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday.

Over the past few months, the streaming giant has aired exhibition events in golf and tennis. It is also slated to air the July 20 bout between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul. Beginning next year, Netflix will start carrying World Wrestling Entertainment’s flagship show, Raw. So there’s been speculation about whether Netflix’s recent forays into live sports are a precursor to becoming a major player for live sports rights. While having another competitor for rights would certainly be welcomed, it is unlikely to happen soon.

Nearly every commercial that runs on TV is backed by a guarantee of how big an audience will watch it. Late last year, Fox and Netflix decided to throw out that rule, one of the oldest in media economics.

After eight and a half years as SVP drama series at HBO, Nora Skinner is going to Netflix where she will be VP in the streamer’s drama series team. Based at Netflix’s Los Angeles headquarters, Skinner, a former film producer and executive, will start at the end of May, reporting to Jinny Howe, Netflix’s VP of drama series.

The July bout between Tyson, the former world champion, and Paul, the influencer turned boxer, is part of Netflix’s push into “sports-adjacent” live events.

Netflix faced a formidable challenge to its streaming dominance during the streaming wars. But the company has bounced back in a big way with its stock up nearly 90% in the last year.

The event and publishing executive says she’s next looking for “a new opportunity with a global scope.”

In the span of a decade, Netflix has helped decimate linear TV, not only gobbling up series that once would have anchored a network lineup but also taking discarded network series — from You to Manifest— and making them hits. That’s left traditional TV clinging to live sports like a life raft: 98 of last year’s top-100 broadcasts were sports (overwhelmingly, NFL). Now Netflix appears to be coming for them, too.

The travel brand will start up a worldwide campaign on Netflix’s ad-supported plan for the entire 2024 year — a multi-country advertising effort to reach more than 23 million global monthly active users.

Activist investor Nelson Peltz believes Walt Disney can achieve profitability in streaming by bundling its ESPN+ online service with a larger player interested in sports, such as Netflix.

Netflix founder and executive chair Reed Hastings has gifted 2 million shares, worth over $1.1 billion at the stock’s current price, to the Mountain View, Calif.-based Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The move was noted in a recent SEC filing without the beneficiary named. The donation was a big chunk of Hastings’ Netflix stock — about 40%. He still owns 2,991,541 shares, the filing said. The stock closed Monday at $575.08.

In her third promotion in a little over three years, Netflix‘s Head of Drama Jinny Howe is further expanding her oversight to all of the streamer’s drama areas, adding Spectacle + Event, current series and shows coming out of Netflix’s roster of overall deals to her purview.

The co-CEO makes a distinction between the “sports entertainment” of pro wrestling and other competitions.

The fourth quarter results announced Tuesday provided further evidence that Netflix was able to come up with a formula that produced a spike in subscribers even as it became more expensive to watch its lineup of TV shows and movies.

In a major shakeup, WWE has struck a deal with Netflix that will see its flagship weekly live pro wrestling show begin airing exclusively on the streaming giant beginning in January 2025. That will mark the first time in its three-decade history that Raw has not aired new episodes on a linear television network. The deal is valued at $500 million per year for 10 years. Netflix has the option to opt out after the initial five years and to extend for an additional 10 years.

Netflix has greenlit another two adaptations of Harlan Coben novels after Fool Me Once became a global hit for the streaming service. Netflix will bring Missing You and Run Away to the screen as limited series over the coming years, with the former going into production this spring.

Ten years after The Square, an acquisition that put Netflix documentaries on the map, the streamer is back at the 40th Sundance Film Festival with an eye towards acquisitions and two very different originals. Yance Ford’s latest, Power, an inquiry into the evolution of policing in America that had its world premiere Thursday night in Park City, Utah. Bao Nguyen’s The Greatest Night in Pop, about the making of the charity anthem We Are The World, debuts Friday before streaming on Jan. 29.

The future of streaming video will turn on whether the FCC bans broadband providers from tampering with online traffic, Netflix argued to the agency this week.

Kevin Hart’s Lift delivered a strong debut with 32.8 million views following its Jan. 12 premiere, making it the most-viewed title this week on the Netflix Top 10 chart and soaring to No. 1 on the English Films List. Falling just beneath that is J.A. Bayona’s survival story Society of the Snow, which landed another 28.1 million views and joins Netflix’s Most Popular Non-English Films List after just 11 days of viewing. The film currently ranks No. 1 on the Non-English Films list.

Pete Hammond of Deadline on Fox’s broadcast of the awards show, its celebration of TV after the strike-induced delay, as well as his “severe case of déjà vu”: “It is as if in this vast TV universe of networks, streamers, cable, You Tube and more content that a human being could ever consume, the people who vote for awards have only seen three shows.”