Video streamer Netflix added 1.75 million paid subscribers in Q1FY23, its total number of global paid subscribers now stands at 232.50 million.
While the increase in paid subscribers is little compared to the 230.75 million Netflix boasted in Q4FY22, it is certainly more encouraging than the first quarter of last year when it lost 200,000 subscribers.
This rise in paid subscribers has helped the streaming giant post revenue of $8.62 million in the January-March quarter at a 3.7% year-on-year growth.
Netflix, in its letter to shareholders, says its decision lower prices in India by 20%-60% in December ’21 combined with an improved slate helped grow engagement in India by nearly 30% year on year while F/X neutral revenue growth in 2022 accelerated to 24% (versus 19% in 2021). Learning from this success, it reduced prices in an additional 116 countries in Q1.
It also says it is pleased with the results of its paid sharing initiative (a crackdown on password sharing) which it had rolled out in Spain, New Zealand, Canada, and Portugal earlier this year. It did not choose a global rollout of the initiative because it “found opportunities to improve the experience for members.”
The streamer is planning a broad rollout including the United States in the next quarter.
The video streamer, seeing the post-pandemic streaming decline, had announced an ad-supported viewing experience last year. It, in its letter, says, it is pleased with its progress and thanks to its most recent set of licensing deals, its ad-supported plan now has on average ~95% content parity globally (by viewing) with our ads-free plans, including all the latest Netflix shows and movies.
“On the advertiser side, we are launching a programmatic private marketplace to enable more buying options for Netflix ad inventory using Microsoft’s sales platform. Our partnerships with Integral Ad Science and Double Verify are also now live – validating campaign engagement of ads viewership on Netflix,” it says.
Adding to this, Netflix will upgrade the feature set of its ads plan to include 1080p versus 720p video quality and two concurrent streams in all 12 ads markets – starting with Canada and Spain.
And, after 25 years, the video streamer will shutter DVD.com because the DVD business continues to shrink, and it will ship its final DVD on September 29, 2023.