The clearly unstoppable global subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) streaming service Netflix has added a whopping 7.41 million new subscribers during the first quarter of this year, largely fueled by its ongoing international expansion in countries like South Africa, beating its own forecasts for the quarter.
Netflix has released its financial results for the first quarter until 31 March 2018 with Netflix that raked in another $3.6 billion in revenue from its 125 million subscribers globally. Netflix added another 5.46 million global subscribers and 1.96 million subscribers in the United States.
This is more new subscriber growth for both the US and internationally, than what Netflix and Wall Street investors projected.
For the 2nd quarter of this year Netflix said it expects 6.2 million global new subscribers.
Big satellite pay-TV operators like Sky in the United Kingdom and Comcast in America, as well as Proximus in Belgium and SFR Altice in France have now started to bundle Netflix as an additional offering.
Sky and Comcast now offer Netflix as a new service folded inside their traditional pay-TV offering, similar to what MultiChoice has done with Naspers' SVOD service, Showmax, that has been bolted on to its DStv service for subscribers in South Africa and the rest of the sub-Saharan African continent.
At its last MultiChoice Content Showcase for media, MultiChoice told the press that it doesn't have any plans to add Netflix for DStv subscribers in the way Showmax is currently made available, although Graeme Cumming, the head of digital media at MultiChoice, in response to a Netflix question, said that the pay-TV operator is always open to exploring new content partnerships.
Netflix in its Q1 results report said that its bundling with existing pay-TV services in international markets makes the sign-up and payment process easier for people who want to use Netflix.
Netflix says where it's bundled with an existing pay-TV service there are less subscribers who leave (lower churn) making these partnerships worthwhile, despite the lower per-subscriber fees it gets through partnership deals.
"We remain primarily a direct-to-consumer business, but we see our bundling initiative as an attractive supplemental channel," Netflix said.
