California-based media service provider Netflix has gained an extra seven million subscribers, beating its own growth estimates by two million.
Netflix now has over 137 million subscribers out of which a 130 million have a paid subscription, with the remainder using free trials.
Over 60 million of Netflix’s subscribers are located in its domestic market the U.S, which saw a growth of 1.8 million new customers in this quarter.
The company’s shares jumped by 14 percent in after-hours trading following the announcement of its third quarter results for 2018.
The significant jump in investment reflects the markets hesitation pre-announcement as it feared a repeat of the companies last quarterly report, when they failed to beat their own estimates for new customers causing the share price to take a hit.
Q3 Report
This quarter they have reported revenues of $4 billion showing a year-on-year rise of 34 percent.
In a taped Q2 report to investors Netflix cited that they are learning new ways to reach customers and that rather than just using device integrations and billing integrations, the company is now working with internet service providers and Pay-TV operators.
Chief Product Officer Greg Peters comment in the investor meeting that: “What we’re seeing here is that this allows us to access a set of subscribers, a consumer demographic which might be less technology early adopter than the folks that are signing us up – with us directly, and so we’re able to sort of accelerate our growth in a new segment via these deals.”
“There’s still pockets of consumers who – it’s harder for them to get the activation energy to go directly to the website and sign up, but if we can actually put a Netflix application, a call to action and maybe even bundle that the service subscription as part of their pay-TV offering or the mobile offering, they can just click on something and then get right into the service.”
EU Concern’s
In their letter to investors Netflix have raised concerns about the impending European Union rewrite of its audio visual laws which will see content providers required to ensure that at least 30 percent of its content is native to the customers region.
This means Netflix will have to rearrange its catalog or library of content to reflect the new laws. In the letter they also noted that: “Some member states are looking to require services like ours to invest some portion of local revenues into European works. We anticipate being able to meet these requirements by evolving our content offering.”
Read More: Netflix on Grill: Streaming Giants Must Have 30% European Content
Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos discussed during the investor meeting the company’s plan for new markets and talked about bringing new content to India, which already has a very large YouTube user base, a major competitor to Netflix.
He commented that the focus in the Indian market is to grown more native content and original shows: “This product that maybe was less known in India, when we launched and make it feel more local, more relevant.”
“A couple hundred million people watching content through the Internet in India is a really exciting idea.”
