Netflix takes hit from Disney's Lightsaber but it's only a flesh wound

The US subscriber numbers disappointrf Wall Street but Netflix's international growth was impressive as it played up viewer numbers for The Crown and The Witcher 

James Moore
Chief Buisness Commentator
Wednesday 22 January 2020 11:58 GMT
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Netflix drama The Witcher didn't find favour with the critics but it was a different story with viewers
Netflix drama The Witcher didn't find favour with the critics but it was a different story with viewers

Baby Yoda has swished his first Lightsaber at the Netflix empire and burned a little bit.

The streaming emperor missed its US subscriber forecasts for its latest quarter, which isn’t particularly unusual. It does that about half the time.

What made this period interesting, however, was the arrival of Disney Plus and the launch of Stream Wars.

With Star Wars spin off the Mandalroian, from whence Baby Yoda comes, lots of upcoming Marvel series, and a serious, serious library, Dinsey has the muscle to make Stream Wars a business box office smash that will keep us entertained for much of the rest of the year and beyond.

Even Netflix CEO Reed Hastings gave a nod to the quality of the what’s on offer from his rival, which managed to sign up 10m US subscribers on its first day.

While he predicted a bigger impact on traditional TV, he had to acknowledge that Netflix has been affected.

One thing the king of streaming was notably keen to stress in its latest quarterly results statement was that it has plenty of its own hits.

The company is notoriously stingy with its viewer numbers and there’s been some debate about how it has changed the way it calculates those it does release. But any release creates a talking point.

Fantasy epic the Witcher, starring Herny Cavill, an apparent attempt to fill the void created by the end of Game of Thrones, got a mixed response from the critics but was a hit with subscribers with 76m households checking in over the first month.

Then there’s The Crown, seen by 73m householders worldwide since it began in 2016. Season three, with Olivia Colman taking over the starring role, was picked up in 21m homes, a 40 per cent rise over season two.

The intent in providing these numbers is clearly strategic: Not only do they give people something other than the disappointing domestic subscriber numbers to talk about and debate, they also serve to stress that Netflix will manage just fine at a time when rivals are keeping content that they might previously have licensed to Netflix for their own streaming services.

And despite Disney's impressive start, Netflix was hardly rushing to the emergency ward. Having forecast 600,000 newbies stateside it ended up with 420,000. In a much more competitive field, that’s ok.

Internationally, and this is an increasingly international business, there was a very different story with 8.4m subscribers added, well ahead of the forecast 7m. Disney is coming, of course, and Apple TV has arrived.

But Netflix maybe deserves more credit than it got from Wall Street for those numbers.

It has a Lightsaber of its own, one that's still humming. It might burn more brightly still on Oscar night given the number of nominations the company's films have picked up, although the cash it’s burning through and the debt it’s taking on to create it all does make for the occasional flicker.

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