Netflix at Morgan Stanley Conference: Strategic Growth and Challenges

Published 06/03/2025, 22:16
Netflix at Morgan Stanley Conference: Strategic Growth and Challenges

On Wednesday, 05 March 2025, Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) participated in the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. The discussion, led by CFO Spence Newman, highlighted Netflix’s robust growth strategies alongside challenges in the competitive streaming market. While the company reported impressive revenue growth, it faces hurdles in expanding its market share and optimizing content spending.

Key Takeaways

  • Netflix achieved nearly 20% revenue growth in Q4 2024 and improved its margins by six points.
  • The company has operationalized its paid sharing solution and doubled its advertising revenue in 2024.
  • Netflix is focusing on expanding its content offerings and refining its advertising strategies.
  • The company is leveraging AI and machine learning to enhance product discovery and content creation.
  • Netflix aims to sustain double-digit revenue growth and expand its international content strategy.

Financial Results

  • Revenue Growth: Netflix reported a near 20% increase in revenue for Q4 2024.
  • Margin Improvement: The company added six percentage points to its margins in 2024.
  • Advertising Revenue: Netflix doubled its advertising revenue in 2024 and anticipates another doubling in 2025.
  • Content Spending: High single-digit growth expected, with content spending around $18 billion.

Operational Updates

  • Paid Sharing: Fully operational, enhancing demand capture.
  • Advertising: Plans to scale ad membership in all 12 ad markets in 2025, with 55% of Q4 sign-ups from the ads tier.
  • Content Production: Active in over 50 countries, focusing on authentic local storytelling.
  • Live Events: Expanding strategy includes comedies, unscripted content, sports, and sports entertainment.
  • Games: Over 100 games launched, emphasizing narrative storytelling and IP leverage.
  • Ad Tech Stack: Launched in Canada in Q4 2024, expanding to the U.S. in April 2025.

Future Outlook

  • Revenue Growth: Aims for sustained double-digit top-line growth.
  • Content Strategy: Emphasizes non-English content and live events.
  • Advertising: Transitioning to more advanced ad tech and programmatic integrations.
  • Games: Expanding cloud delivery to television and testing new formats.
  • International Expansion: Focus on content from EMEA, APAC, and LATAM.
  • AI and ML: Used to improve product discovery and enterprise productivity.

Q&A Highlights

  • Competition with YouTube: Netflix is focusing on expanding entertainment time, leveraging its strengths in direct-to-consumer entertainment.
  • Content Spending: Continues to optimize content allocation across genres and regions.
  • Sports Rights: Open to broader packages if economically viable, focusing on eventized moments.
  • WWE Partnership: Successful launch with viewing slightly ahead of expectations.
  • AI and ML: Enhancing product discovery and content creation.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference:

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: right.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Okay. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website. Ben Swinburne, Morgan Stanley’s Media and Telecom Analyst. And I’m really excited to welcome back to the conference, Spence Newman, CFO of Netflix. Spence, thanks for coming.

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Thanks, man. Good to see you, Ben. Good to

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: see you. Thanks for making a flight up the coast.

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Yes, easy flight. That’s pretty easy for us. We’ll take it. We’re up here all the time.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: We were just talking about how many years you’ve been coming to the conference. And I think two years ago, 2023, the business was growing sort of like mid single digits and the mood was pretty glum out there. If we look at 2024, you guys reported, certainly the fourth quarter, almost 20% top line growth. You added six points of margin. So I mean, a lot of hard work to really accelerate the business.

Why don’t we start kind of high level and sort of talk about what’s allowed the business at your scale and it really accelerate in that level as quickly?

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Sure, sure. I’ll jump right into that. I’m not going to go back to the twenty twenty conference that was the first one we did when I was at Netflix, which was just the start of COVID and it was a pretty weird conference. So we’re not going to go to that. We’ll go to what you talked about.

So the reacceleration of growth, it is something we’ve been very focused on. When we kind of slowed down, there were two things we looked at as kind of key tactical moves. First was to have a solution for account sharing. We had a bunch of demand in the marketplace, but it was being a lot of Netflix was being watched for free, so we had to address that. And we wanted to build a kind of incremental revenue and profit pool around advertising.

So those were the two key tactical moves. On the paid sharing front over the last two years, we went from launching that solution to then rolling it out globally and now to the point that we’ve talked about in the last couple of earnings calls to really fully operationalizing that solution so that we can just have a better engine, if you will, to kind of translate the value, capture the demand of that we’re creating in terms of our strengthening entertainment offering. And then on the advertising front, still early in that build out as well, but we made a bunch of progress. We’ve scaled reach quite significantly over the last couple of years. We talked about on the last earnings call, we believe we’ll deliver critical ad membership scale in all of our 12 ad markets in 2025, and then kind of move on to kind of further improving the monetization of all of that inventory.

And I’m sure we’ll talk a bit more about that. So those are really the two tactical levers and on top of that, what we’re most focused on is continuing to improve our service all the time across all aspects of Netflix and to because the competition is improving as well. So the key for us is improving faster than the competition and then we can drive that growth flywheel of more And then we can drive that growth flywheel of more and better entertainment, delivers more engagement, more revenue and more profit.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: No matter how well you do, we always want more, as I’m sure you know. So you talk a lot about trying to sustain double digit top line for kind of as long as you can. What’s the opportunity still ahead? I mean, 300,000,000 members, $40,000,000,000 in revenue. Last year, you said we’re just getting started.

I know it’s a year later, but talk about sort of the addressable market you still see ahead for the business.

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Yes, yes. So I see that we are still just getting started. So we can say it again. It has been progress since then, but and we’re pleased with the progress. We did reaccelerate revenue growth as we just talked about.

We talked about on the last earnings call our outlook for ’25 and that being healthy and then we believe it’s healthy in a long runway beyond that. So again, as we think about the business we’re in, it’s a pretty big market. So even though we are pretty big today at over 300,000,000 paying members around the world and audience, when you multiply that by the number of people viewing in any given household, we’re entertaining an audience of over 700,000,000 around the world. So it’s pretty big scale, but we’re still small on kind of every key measure for us in terms of addressable market. So we’re in about 40% roughly of the connected TV households around the world and that’s a connected TV universe that continues to grow.

We’re capturing about 6% of our addressable revenue market and we’re less than 10% TV view share, again, in every major country in which we operate. So the key for us is, again, it’s a pretty kind of simple model. We want to deliver more and more entertainment value around the world. It’s a very broad offering across film and TV, increasingly games, and we’re expanding that entertainment offering. And if we can do that and then to kind of drive that flywheel, have a better kind of value kind of translation engine on top of it where we can grow into more members, we have pricing and plan kind of evolution over time.

We’re getting more sophisticated there. And then we have the third lever of advertising. We think we can drive revenue and profit growth as we continue to kind of control our expenses to be growing slower than revenue for many, many years to come.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: You mentioned earlier sort of the competition.

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: And I wanted to ask you in particular about YouTube.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: And I know, competition. And I wanted to ask you in particular about YouTube. And I know between the two of you, it’s still a minority of viewership, so there’s a lot of room for both services to grow. It’s certainly not a zero sum game. But it does seem like they are increasingly maybe one of your, if not your primary competitor for video content engagement.

How do you guys think about their product market fit and sort of what they’re offering consumers, what you guys do, where there is and isn’t overlap? Just talk about YouTube as a long term competitor in your mind.

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Yes, sure. Well, we definitely compete. There’s no question we compete for entertainment time around the world. But as you point out, we’re what we’re most focused on is growing into that entertainment time that neither of us have today. So in The U.

S. As an example, there’s just that’s just one example, but there’s roughly 80 of TV view share that neither of us are capturing. So that’s our big growth opportunity. And then the question is what’s our kind of counter positioning or our strengths. And for us, we are a leader in direct to consumer entertainment and we think we have different strengths that we lean into.

So first, we deliver audiences at pretty massive scale. I mentioned 700,000,000 plus and growing around the world. We also deliver, we believe to be kind of a leading amazing discovery experience and product experience for premium video content. We also we share in the risk, the creative and economic risk with our creators. That’s an important thing.

Our creators understand that. So we’re sharing in that with them and we’re kind of aligned in our objectives. And then, and the last piece of it is, we’re a leader in the ability to monetize engagement on think of it as like on a per hour basis. And that’s great for our creators because it helps fund their big ambitions of their existing projects and their next projects. So when you combine all those things and we keep focusing on that, the outcome of that is we think we’re the home for the best stories and the best creators on the planet and we want to keep doing that.

And if we do that, we think we can grow into that incremental viewing. And it’s an industry that has and always will be intensely competitive, whether it’s YouTube or others. So we have to lean into our strengths and keep building on them.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: That’s helpful. That’s a good point on the sort of creator proposition that you make. Why don’t we talk a little bit about content spending and content investment? I mean, when I think about your stock and the business, I was focused on kind of trying to assess return on content spend. And couple of numbers that I find interesting are, for the last five years, you’ve grown revenues on a CAGR basis in kind of the low to mid teens, but your cash content spend has grown about 3%.

So by definition, Bella and the team are really driving they’re getting more dollars out of every dollar they put into content. So what allows you to do that? Because the market is competitive, the business is getting bigger and yet the return on content spend seems to be really improving.

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Yes. It’s yes, certainly credit to Bell and the team for delivering more and more entertainment value per dollar. I mean, that’s the core of it. I mean, when you think about delivering return on investment, it starts with the first piece of it is we are kind of a learning organization. It’s always continuous improvement.

How do we best allocate our content dollars for highest impact, the existing dollars and then the next billion, if you will, or the next dollar, the next billion dollars. And it’s across this huge variety and quality of content. So we’re trying to optimize across English language, scripted TV and film, unscripted TV, documentaries, docuseries, animation, anime, increasingly now we also have games content as well, but we’re doing it in English language, non English language. We’re producing in more than 50 countries around the world. So how do we optimize that spend for highest member impact?

And we get smarter about it every year. And then on top of that, again, if you layer on top of that learning, the better ability to kind of capture the demand, which we talked about in terms of improving that value translation engine now with a paid sharing solution, with an ads business that’s growing and more sophisticated pricing and planning. The combination of those things allows us to drive a higher return on investment. Where is the incremental dollar these days going? I know it’s you guys are focused on a lot of different parts of the sort of different genres, different languages.

Is there a particular area that’s maybe in maintenance mode versus where you’re really leaning in right now? Well, we see opportunity to grow everywhere. We talked about that a little bit on the last earnings call it at again less than 10% TV view share in all of our countries. It’s more about where’s the highest opportunity to grow and spend as opposed to like we focus on growth versus maintenance mode. We want to stay in growth mode versus maintenance mode for as long as possible, healthy growth mode.

And And you see that in terms of even just like how we’re some of the things in terms of that we’re leaning into this year in 2025 when we talk about our 2025 slate. Even English language scripted TV, which is one of our most mature areas in some ways in terms of original content, We’ve got three of our biggest returning seasons coming back between Squid Game and Wednesday and Stranger Things. So that content category is growing. Secure licensed content from our partners in a way that’s a win for them and a win for us. We’re growing live.

Live is a growth category for us. We’re just starting to build out our live offering in The U. S. And then hopefully there’s a long runway from there. And And like we talked about in terms of non English or just content originating from countries across EMEA, APAC and LATAM, those are all kind of in varying degrees of maturity and lots of growth.

So we continue to lean into that at a pretty healthy clip.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yes. I mentioned the 3% CAGR this year. I think you guys are at least the market’s expecting kind of high single digit growth, content spend of about $18,000,000,000 How do you guys put that together from a budgeting and kind of investment perspective? What helps you arrive at the right spending level for a given year?

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Yes, sure. It’s a little art and science, right? So, I mean, at the end of the day, it starts it’s top down and bottoms up. In the top, we have a pretty good sense of predictability of our revenue, right? So we’re primarily a subscription model.

We’ve got a pretty good sense over time of the ability to kind of drive demand and revenue from our investments across the business. So we start with that. And then we also set our margin targets. As you know, we’re trying to grow we have this it’s a pretty simple model overall, but hard to execute in terms of entertainment value, engagement revenue, profit. So as we kind of look at that, we kind of we have a sense of the engagement and revenue we can deliver.

We have margin targets that we’re trying to deliver, so we can back into how we support the business, what’s left over for content. We also kind of balance having enough for kind of the long term investment to continue to drive growth. And that’s why we want to grow margins each year, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less depending on the kind of in year investment opportunities. And of course, then what’s left over is to spend into content. And so then there’s the bottoms up exercise, which we talked about as we look at those categories of content across genres, across countries and regions and across original and licensed content and where can we deliver highest impact.

And again, we’re a learning machine, so it’s fluid, it’s iterative. We look at it every quarter, every year and iterate, but that’s kind of what we’re balancing towards because we’re not anywhere near a ceiling. So it’s how is it in any given year that we can in a kind of a responsible way invest into

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: the growth. It’s been really interesting for us to get a look at all the engagement data that you guys now put out every six months. I think the most recent was maybe last week, came out for the second half of last year. I mean, one of the things that I always try to highlight to folks is just the level of consumption of non English language programming. And I guess, I’d love to hear, Spence, how kind of Bella has set up the global organization to scale up production around the world at this level.

Like that must be a massive exercise.

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Yes. And obviously, huge credit to Bella. So what it kind of starts with, again, we’ve hit on this, I’ll sound a little bit like a broken record, but when we’re for the size of audience we’re programming to, which for premium video, no one’s ever kind of programmed to an audience at this scale before. So 700,000,000 plus people around the world and growing. That’s a ton of taste and cultures and mood states.

And so, given that, our kind of the first the starting point is a huge variety and quality of content. That’s one. And then we also have a principle that those stories, the best stories can come from anywhere. So in doing that, to your point, Bell has built a global studio. We’re producing in 50 countries around the world and then or more than 50 countries.

And then for it to work, one of our core beliefs is that and Bella talks about this a lot is those stories have to start with big local impacts, so that has to be authentic storytelling. And so if we believe that it’s authentic storytelling with big impact and then those stories, if they’re great with subtitles and dubs and great product discovery, they can occasionally travel some kind of across countries or regions or the exceptional ones that travel and become global hits like a Squid Game or Society of the Snow or Lupin. So that’s really what she’s trying to do or trying to do and she’s leading. And then to accomplish that, it starts with therefore having amazing creative executives in all these countries around the world. And that’s what kind of Bell has really leaned into as the strategy of authentic storytelling, local first and two, having creative executives who can kind of lead that in and then you overlay with that a culture of distributed decision making and transparency and a focus on continuous improvement.

And that’s the kind of a combination of a kind of that art, science and kind of structure and systems that allows us, we believe, to deliver variety and quality at scale and keep building on improving on it.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. One more topic on the content front, Spence. I wanted to talk about sports. It’s been a big topic this week at the conference across a lot of speakers. I’ll tease you a little bit.

Whenever we ask you about sports, you guys say, no, we have a live event strategy. It’s not a sports strategy, it’s live events.

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Yes, you should answer this question for me then, because that’s where I was going. The question is what’s the difference? Well, the difference is, live events is kind of a broader category for us. So we are trying to, again, in that notion of variety and quality of entertainment for our members, what are more and more ways to deliver more and more entertainment value. We want things that kind of pierce the pop culture that folks are talking about that folks and drive conversation and live is a component of that.

But live cuts across, we want to build on the passion for comedies, for unscripted content, for sports, sports entertainment and live is a component of doing that. It creates more appointment viewing, more conversation, it kind of delivers on a lot of those things. And we’ve seen that. We saw it with the Tom Brady roast. We saw it with John Mulaney on the talk show side.

We saw it with the Paul Tyson fight with NFL on Christmas Day and now with WWE. So we are in those big eventized moments. We see with that, that it drives kind of the core things we’re trying to do in terms of entertainment value to members, acquisition. There’s more conversation happening and there’s kind of we also believe it will drive even better retention over time for our service. So those are the things that we’re learning into.

It’s a relatively small percentage of our spend, and it’s also a small percentage of our view hours, but not all view hours are created equal. And when we do it right, it works well for us, but not all live content works for us. And so when we say like works, it has to be those big live events that also work for our business and work for our shareholders. And being in the business of regular seasons, full seasons of big sports, we haven’t found that yet to be something that we necessarily need to deliver more entertainment value and can do it in a way that’s a good business for us and for our shareholders.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: I’m glad you brought that up. So in your shareholder letter, you guys were pretty explicit that exactly that large sport, regular season rights don’t make sense for you. There was an interview that Bella did recently where she certainly sounded like she expressed some interest in NFL rights, Sunday afternoon NFL rights. Can you kind of reconcile those two comments to for the audience please?

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Yes, yes, sure. So, yes, I guess if we replay the tape on that interview, I won’t ask you all to listen to it. But if you did, it’s at the very end of a pretty long interview and it’s kind of a rapid fire set of hypotheticals and one of the hypotheticals was sort of like what sport would you take or something like that. And I think the reference was to an NFL package. But the point is, it was hypothetical.

At the end of the day, our strategy has not changed. We are in the live event business, sports part of those live events. We love the NFL. We love the NFL on Christmas Day. That was an awesome event.

NFL on Christmas Day, Beyonce Bowl, it worked. It was the largest streaming audio regular season streaming audience for an NFL game in The U. S. So it was awesome. But that’s kind of where we are right now and we want to keep finding these great eventized moments.

We keep looking, it’s not like it’s a never say never on these things. If there’s a way to make economic sense and business sense about a broader package of sports. We remain open to it, but it’s not something that’s in our kind of near term horizon or something we kind of see

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: a clear path to. You won’t be surprised here. Mark Shapiro was on stage here on Monday and he’s very excited about how WWE is doing on Netflix. What’s anything interesting from your perspective? I know we’re maybe a couple of months in.

Any learnings or how is it going relative to what you guys thought?

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Well, it’s still early, but as you heard Mark, it’s been a great partnership out of the gates and we had a nice launch. Following the launch, the viewing has been steady. It’s obviously a bit bigger in that first week, right? But it’s kind of leveled out and been steady in a way that’s actually slightly ahead of what we expected. So it’s delivering those kind of nice eventized moments on a regular cadence, it’s weekly moments as opposed and it’s raw here in The U.

S. It’s a broader offering of WWE outside of The U. S. And as you heard from Mark, it’s expanded there. We believe it’s expanded their audience a little bit.

So again, we’re kind of still learning into it. We’re super pleased. And it’s the kind of thing you get back to like how could something that’s kind of longer duration work for us that’s more kind of regular live as those are still events. They’re weekly eventized moments, but but that worked for us in terms of the economics in the business because we did have the kind of certainty of both long duration in terms of how the deal is structured and cost certainty in terms of how the economics are structured. So that’s not something we can do every day.

Sure. But when we can, we’re open to it. Yes.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Okay. All right. Let’s shift gears to advertising. Obviously, a big focus in the market today. What are you guys doing right now to try to get this to the next level?

You’ve talked about crawl, walk, run. What’s the work happening in 2025 at Netflix to sort of take advertising to the next level?

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Yes. Well, I think as Greg said on our last earnings call, this is a year where we do expect to go from crawl to walk. For walking. So we’re working towards walking. You can see wobble sometimes.

But, but no, we made great progress. We’re super pleased with how ads is building out. We’re a couple of years into this now. And the first piece is we had to scale our ads reach. We talked about that.

The key is that advertising and an advertising tier is one that is a nice accessible price point in these 12 kind of big ad markets around the world where we can offer all that Netflix has to offer at an accessible price and great choice for our members, because that has to work and you see that’s working. Again, in the last call, we talked about how in Q4, about 55% of our sign ups are coming into the ads tier. That drove nice growth in the ads tier. It was like 30 ish percent sequential growth in Q4 coming off of 35% sequential growth in the ads tier the quarter before that and even more in the quarters before that. So we’re getting to critical scale in all of our ads markets.

And now the focus in 2025 is it allows us to kind of focus even more of our efforts on the monetization of that reach because our monetization has not kept up yet with the scale. A key piece of that is in getting into investment is investment into our first party ad tech stack, because that’s foundational for us. We launched our first party ad tech stack in Canada in Q4. We’ll launch it more broadly starting with The U. S.

In April of twenty twenty five and then to all of our ads markets. And once we have that in all of our ads markets in 2025, and on top of that, while we’re doing that, we’re building out programmatic integrations, you heard from The Trade Desk just before this, I think. We’re building out a kind of audience measurement, And we’re building out our sales force and sales operations, again, in all of those markets. So think of it as all those things are happening in 2025. It is that year where we are while doing that, we’re growing the business.

We talked about doubling we doubled the revenue, our ads revenue in ’24. We talked about the fact that we expect to double, again in ’25 roughly. So we’re growing. It’s just not a primary driver of growth in the business, but it’s getting more meaningful. And it’s a year where we’re investing in those foundational capabilities so that in the years ahead, in this multi year growth path, it does become one of those key levers of revenue growth.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: When you go from you’ve been operating, I think, largely with Zander historically as your partner to your own first party ad tech and you’ve done it in Canada. Is there any is it one or two things specifically that’s really unlocking advertiser demand and allowing you to sell through more of your inventory? Or is it just basically the laundry list of things you just kind of walk through?

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: It’s I mean, it’s a bit of a list. I mean, it falls into categories, but it starts with again, it is pretty foundational. So we need that as the starting point because then it kind of it reduces just the some of the friction right now in the marketplace, even just kind of plugging into our advertisers and creating, buying process. So that’s kind of number one. Two, just expanding our programmatic offerings.

So right now, it’s we’re really just starting that, but that those programmatic integrations and capabilities, we can accelerate once we’re on our ad stack. Talk about measurement and targeting, again, doing that and evolving that through our own tech stack, we have much more control over that. And then when we get into the kind of the multi year roadmap of kind of product capabilities, add product capabilities, whether it’s more relevance, more personalization, more innovation, again, we’re kind of in the meet the market stage now, but over time it goes beyond meet the market to innovation because our goal is to be to marry the best of digital with, in terms of like connected targeted audience with the best of TV branded advertising in terms of this elevated creative experience tied to premium video content and titles that are piercing the zeitgeist with a highly engaged audience. So doing those things well is a kind of a long runway of innovation, but it starts with this ad stack.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Last question on advertising. You talked about you’re trying to double the business this year. It’s coming off a low base. Is there a way for us to think about your kind of long term ambitions? I don’t know if it’s an arm level or a percent of revenue or sort of how big the opportunity is for you guys if you look out over the next, say, five years?

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Well, I mean, the real ambition is what I just talked about. We want to be this best of digital and branded TV advertising in a premium video marketplace. If we do that well and we deliver the great thing is like we are it’s a highly engaged audience engagement on our ad tier is very similar to our non ad tier. We’re also creating advertising opportunities in live across all tiers. So we’re delivering big audience, as we get better at that relevance, personalization, etcetera.

It’s a big incremental revenue and profit pool for us. It’s an addressable market of kind of call it in the it’s about 80% of the branded advertising marketplace for video is in the countries in which we operate today. It’s a roughly $180,000,000,000 market opportunity that we’re trying to grow into. So we look at it as there’s two things. One, it helps us sustain and deliver an accessible price point to our members and it can be a really kind of material, added leg to the stool so that we have three formidable ways in which we’re growing into our revenue and profit pool between member growth, pricing plan evolution and advertising.

I think when you talk about five years, I think you should expect that we will be for the foreseeable future, maybe forever, a primarily subscription business. But if ads can be a meaningful minority of our revenue, that’s still a very important contributor to us. Certainly contributor to growth. And to that flywheel, again, engagement revenue profit flywheel, ads can be a big part of that flywheel. Sure.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Okay. Let’s talk about product. You mentioned at the top, password sharing and your paid sharing initiatives. I mean, net adds last year were well beyond where I think most people were expecting, especially because we thought you had a tough compare to 2023. You guys often talk about having operationalized page sharing sort of in the business.

What does that mean? And is this still benefiting growth in membership today? Here we are, gosh, I don’t know, eighteen months since you started in earnest implementing password sharing, paid sharing?

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Yes. By operationalize, I mean, it’s kind of like everything else we do. Once we’ve rolled it out, we have a solution that obviously worked. We’re pleased with how that rollout has gone. Again, it sounds like a broken record, but as we deliver more entertainment value or better, we’re set up to better capture that value.

So that’s really what we’ve done is we’ve improved that value translation engine. And now we go forward, we optimize it just like we optimize everything we do. If you think about like the last things like sign up flow, I think Greg may have talked about this on recent earnings calls. We’ve been optimizing our sign up flow and lifecycle management for a decade and we’re still delivering big wins year in and year out. And that’s kind of where we view page sharing today is that we’ve rolled out a global solution.

It is working as a better value capture, demand capture, but there’s plenty of optimizations and we’ve got our roadmap for years. Yes. How about AI? How do you

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: see that from here as an opportunity? I know you guys have been using machine learning for a very long time. Everyone’s very envious in the industry of your recommendation engine. But I would imagine internally you think AI could be a pretty big opportunity

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: to further improve the business? Yes. As you say, we’ve been working with AI and ML for, I don’t know, fifteen plus years and now increasingly Gen AI as a way to kind of create leverage and improve every aspect of the business. I think the most site exciting is probably in the finance area. No?

Okay. Okay. I won’t go with that. It’s not an audience that laughs. No, I mean, but seriously, like we’re leveraging AI, Gen AI everywhere.

So it’s everything from enterprise productivity across those support functions like finance and legal, to ways that we can improve the member experience and the ways that we can provide tools to creators to improve the creative experience. And again, it’s the human creative experience. So like if you kind of think about some of the things we’re working on like on the product side, we’re leveraging Gen AI to in ways we’re testing the algos to improve product discovery, title discovery, leveraging AI and the creation of promotional assets again to improve the ability for anyone to find that title that’s best fit for them in a moment in time. We’re testing conversational search on our service through generative AI. So all ways to kind of improve product discovery member experience.

On the content side, as I said, it’s like it really is about delivering creative tools for our creators to support their creative endeavors and experience. I mean, I think Ted talks about this a lot. We are much stronger as a company if we can deliver 10% better content than 50% cheaper content. Instead, think about that on the content side, but think about that across all of our services. We’re trying to leverage AI to at the end of the day, improve every aspect of the Netflix service, so we can deliver more and more and better entertainment value to folks around the world.

So that’s what we’re focused on. And I don’t think there’s a silver bullet, but we’re excited about

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: the opportunity. Yes. I just want to make sure we do touch on games briefly. A couple of years into this investment. I think you guys kept it relatively modest, but you’ve also brought in some new leadership.

Yes. And so that in Netflix games division, what if there’s a new strategy, what is the strategy? And so how do you assess your position and progress so far?

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Yes. So, first off, again, we’re pretty early in games. We’re a few years in. When we launched games, we were very clear that we’re not the pioneer in games. We’re a little bit late to the party and think of this as building over decade, not building over a few years.

So we’re early. But we’re also we’re pleased that we’ve accomplished a lot. We made progress. We’ve launched over 100 games on service today, but we’re also not where we want to be, right? So we’re not where we need and want to be, but we see signals of where we are headed.

So our core strategy has not changed. Games is a big represents a big share of entertainment time. Our aspiration as a company is to be the most loved, most valued entertainment company on the planet. We have a long way to go, but part of that is competing for entertainment moments of truth. Games is part of that.

So our core strategy is to deliver great games within the Netflix membership, deliver more and more value to our members and deliver more and more quality engagement, engagement revenue profit. We have sharpened our focus a bit with Elon and I think that’s great. So we’ve focused on a few key verticals that we’re going to kind of build into with narrative storytelling games, next phase of party games, like house party games that are through the television. We have still kind of broad commercial games like GTA, but also leveraging our IP and kids games games for kids and families. So there’s kind of a few verticals that he’s really focused on.

But the key is that we want to kind of continue to drive and deliver more engagement at scale. And again, we see signals of the value this is delivering. Squid Game Unleashed launched in Q4 simultaneously essentially with Squid Game Season two. So you can kind of squint at that transmedia opportunity of delivering entertainment across film, TV and games that are connected and the connectivity of that IP. It It was actually our most downloaded game to date on path to be, and it is with our IP, which is encouraging.

You can also see at pretty small scale today, but the retentive benefit of folks who are playing games and also watching film and TV on our service and with our bigger games, a bit of acquisition benefit. So it’s still small scale, but you kind of see what the signal of what we’re trying to do and grow into, including getting beyond just mobile. So we talked about we’re going to continue to test into cloud delivery of games onto television. We’ll expand on that this year. But the long term vision is to deliver great games to our members across multiple services, cloud enabled to the TV, but across TV and mobile.

That’s helpful. We’re getting we’re going to run

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: out of time soon. I did want to ask you one more question. You probably don’t get a lot in this context, which is really around the culture memo at Netflix. It gets a lot of attention in the press. Yes.

I know it’s really important internally. You guys rolled out a new one last summer. I don’t know, talk about why this matters at Netflix and what were the changes that you guys implemented last year?

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Sure. So we’re always evolving the culture memos. The key is that it’s not static. We want to improve it all the time just like everything else. And the core to the culture memo is that our culture is about kind of in search of excellence, seeking excellence and be able to deliver excellence.

And the culture is really a set of kind of tactics to help us deliver on excellence, right? So what we the latest modifications are that’s just normal for us and we tightened it up, we made it more succinct to obtainable, more clear in some areas and some kind of tweaks around the edges for kind of where we continue to grow and evolve as a company. But the core is the same and the, what it does for us in terms of providing really a framework for how do we as an operating model deliver excellence because the key for us is like the worst thing that can happen is if we don’t innovate fast enough, if we lose our kind of creative edge and innovative edge. And so this is about driving that forward continuous improvement. And it’s the key to our culture, it’s the key to how we’ve adapted and how we’ve remained flexible.

So it’s because of that culture, we believe that we’re able to evolve from a DVD service to a streaming service, to go from a U. S. Based company to one that was global, to one that was licensing second run content, to getting into originals and being the biggest producer of original content around the world and now expanding our entertainment offering into live and ads and games. So it keeps us flexible, adaptable and hopefully, operating at a pace where we’re innovating and moving faster than the competition. But that’s the challenge.

Got it.

Ben Swinburne, Media and Telecom Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Spence, I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much for coming. All right.

Spence Newman, CFO, Netflix: Thanks for having me. Thanks, everybody.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

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