Nearly Half of Q1 Netflix Subscribers Came From Outside US, Company Says
Netflix added 4.95 million new subscribers in Q1, the company said Monday in its Q1 letter to shareholders. That was slightly lower than analysts’ forecasts of 5.3 million net additions. In Q4, Netflix added 7.05 million subscribers and 6.74 million…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
in Q1 a year earlier. In the U.S., Netflix added only 1.42 million subscribers in Q1, the letter said, down from 1.83 million added in Q4 and 2.23 million added in Q1 a year earlier, it said. As of Q1, 48.5 percent of Netflix subscriptions came from outside the U.S., up from 47.3 percent in Q4 and 42.4 percent from Q1 a year earlier, the company said. It bears watching Tuesday how the Q1 results will affect the company’s volatile stock price. Minutes before the company released results at 4:05 p.m. EDT Monday, Netflix shares closed 3 percent higher at $147.25. The company is seeing “a small but steady migration” to its four-stream Ultra HD “video quality tier” with high dynamic range, “which is our high end plan. That will keep revenue growth slightly above membership growth.” Netflix investors often ask the company about “ecosystem change” in the competitive environment, including the advent in the U.S. of “virtual MVPDs” like PlayStation Vue and DirecTV Now, the letter said. “We believe VMVPDs will likely be more directly competitive to existing MVPD services since they offer a subset of the same channels at $30-$60 per month, and may appeal to a segment of the population that doesn’t subscribe to a pay TV bundle.”