by Thinus Ferreira
On Thursday night Netflix revealed its third-quarter 2024 financial results and that it added another 5.1 million subscribers worldwide, blaming its "patchier" content offering on the wake of the Hollywood strikes.
On Thursday the global video streaming service announced that it has grown to 282.2 million subscribers worldwide.
This is its penultimate release of quarterly subscriber numbers since Netflix announced earlier that it will stop releasing numbers from the first quarter of 2025.
In its latest quarterly investors' letter, Netflix indicated that paid users now watch Netflix for an average of two hours per day.
"Engagement on Netflix is healthy: around two hours a day per paid membership on average, despite the impact of paid sharing,” the streamer said.
Netflix said it won't bundle its streaming service with others in the way that other American streamers are doing and contemplating.
"Programming for such a large, engaged audience, with so much variety and great quality, is hard. It's why streaming services which lack our breadth of content are increasingly looking to bundle their offerings (selling and discounting their services together, channel offerings, etc.)."
"Netflix is already an extraordinary package of series and films (licensed and original), and increasingly games and live events - all in one place and for one price, easy to use and great value for money."
"We believe there's a huge opportunity to grow that share by investing
even more in our slate and continuing to improve the variety and quality of our offering. Part of that
improvement is ensuring we have a steady drumbeat of great, new TV shows, movies and games
throughout the year to satisfy our members."
Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-CEO, on Netflix's third quarter investors' earnings call, noted that its content in 2024 was "patchier than normal" due to the fallout from the joint actors and writers strikes in America and that Netflix's production pipeline "hasn't fully recovered".
"Our aim here is to always have a very steady drumbeat of great new TV shows and films and games for our members to watch throughout the year - a drumbeat so steady that when you're watching the last episode of whatever you're watching, you start expecting the next thing to be great, too," he said.
"The first half of this year, our lineup was much lumpier than we liked, and it was primarily because of the work stoppage. It did hit the United States and Canada the hardest the hardest, but there were some effects of that felt in production around the world."
"We’re moving closer and closer to a more normalised output schedule now, series are a little more on track than film, but neither are fully recovered," he said.
Over the next quarter to the end of 2024 Netflix will release the second season of South Korea's Squid Game, No Good Deed with Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano, as well as the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight on 15 November.
Also on the Netflix schedule are Man on the Inside with Ted Danson, as well as Black Doves from the United Kingdom with Keira Knightley.
Film-wise Netflix will release The Piano Lesson, Emilia Pérez, the action movie Carry-On with Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman, as well as Tyler Perry's war drama The Six Triple Eight with with Kerry Washington.
In 2025 Netflix will release a new Knives Out film, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein and the Russo brothers' film The Electric State with Millie Bobby Brown, as well as a new season of Wednesday.