At its latest earnings call on Tuesday, Netflix reported a net subscriber addition of 8.8 million, most of which came from outside the United States. According to the company, it ended Q4, 2019, with 167 million paid subscribers globally, more than 100 million of which are in international markets. It also reported higher-than-projected revenues, which stood at $4.5 billion for the quarter, bringing its total 2019 revenues to more than $20 billion.
A lot of this growth can be attributed to the service’s wide-ranging portfolio of content, including regional content, that’s readily available to its subscribers. The service offers its content across multiple platforms with a rich feature set that includes offline viewing as well, at least, until you reach the Netflix download limit. The service’s merits also include the fact that unlike some players, such as Prime Video, Netflix does not show ads in its interface.
The fastest growing markets for Netflix in the last quarter were in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), LATAM (Latin America) and APAC (Asia Pacific) regions, which totaled for a lion’s share of the company’s 8.8 million net subscriber adds. The UCAN (United States and Canada) region, meanwhile, accounted for just 550,000 net adds, largely because of the recent price hikes in the US and stiff competition from new launches like the Disney+ and Apple TV+, said the company.
In fact, recent reports suggested that the streaming giant actually lost more than 1 million subscribers to Disney+ in just over than a month since the latter’s launch. Alongside the blockbuster launch of Disney+, which is said to have garnered more than 10 million users within 24 hours of its general availability, Netflix is also understood to have been hit hard by the launch of Apple TV+ last year.
It is expected to face further competition on its home turf with the launch of a couple of more streaming services this year, including WarnerMedia’s HBOMax and NBCUniversal’s Peacock. All of that is in addition to services like Amazon Prime Videos and Hulu that have been the company’s biggest competitors over the past several years.
Netflix, meanwhile, is seemingly putting up a brave front in the face of the continuing onslaught from new streaming platforms, saying that it believes that there’s enough room for multiple new services as the streaming market continues to grow and conventional TV continues to decline in the coming days.
