Netflix heading for 100m subscriber mark this weekend

Netflix is expecting to hit a major milestone in a matter of days. Between January to end of March, it added 5 million new subscribers from around the world.

That brought the total of its customers in 190 countries to 98.75 million.

This weekend should see it hit the 100 million mark, predicted CEO Reed Hastings, as he released the game-changing, 10-year-old company’s financials for this year’s first quarter.

2017 will mark another milestone for Netflix, suggest investors.

By the end of the year, it will have more customers outside the U.S. than within it. By the end of the March, it had 50.85 million in the U.S. and 47.9 million internationally.

Of this year’s new five million additions, 3.53 million were non-Americans.

These 2017 figures saw Netflix draw less than expected. But Hastings plans to spend $1 billion this year to “drive member acquisition”.

It has a two-fold strategy to add to its paying numbers: get into more countries (although China remains a closed door) and invest in more original content.

Hastings predicts that Netflix will reach the 200 million mark much quicker than it hit 100 million.

After all, its biggest growth has come in the last five years, with 72 million signing on.

Says Hastings, “Everybody watches TV and nearly everybody has the internet, so I don’t see anything that’s going to stop Netflix from getting to most people in the United States and then eventually hopefully most people around the world.”

After launching in Australia in March 2015, Netflix made its presence felt quickly. Local streaming service Presto crumbled under its juggernaut.

In December 2016, Roy Morgan research reported that 5.75 million Australians were subscribing to Netflix in their homes through 2.2 million household subscriptions.

Its problem though is that Foxtel subscribers tend to watch twice as much content. Four in ten Netflixers admit they watch 3 hours to less in a week. 35% spend three to seven hours, 14% tune in for eight to 14 hours.

Netflix faces a number of problems. It is still facing low profits. Between January and March 2017, it earned $178 million from revenue of $2.64 billion, a 35% rise.

Analysts predict that it will make $11 billion for the entire 12 months of 2017, of which it makes $482 million. It will spend $8 million in programming this year, up from $5 million in 2016.

Netflix still lags behind pay TV channel HBO which has134 million subscribers worldwide.

Netflix subscribers collectively stream more than 1 billion hours of programming per week Google, mostly YouTube, achieves that figure in a day.

“Our viewing is very large and growing, but nowhere near as big as YouTube,” Hastings admits. “We definitely have YouTube envy.”

But he also citedan unexpected foe as one of the streaming giant’s competitors for its customers’ eyeballs and time: bedtime.

“You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. You really — we’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.”