【2015 Archives】

Nearly 10 years after Netflix began offering online streaming of movies015 ArchivesTV shows, the company says it's all set to hit the 100-million subscribers mark.

The California-based company says it expects to hit the milestone this weekend. "It’s a good start," the company wrote (PDF) to shareholders at the earnings call for the first quarter of 2017.

Netflix added nearly five million subscribers worldwide in the first quarter of 2017, down from more than seven million subscribers it added the quarter before that. As of end of March, the on-demand streaming service had 98.75 million streaming members worldwide.

With nearly 100 million subscribers, Netflix assumes lead in the on-demand streaming space. The company says it remains "incredibly excited about the opportunity in front of us to build a truly global and durable internet TV business."

Once a lone figure, Netflix now competes with Amazon’s Prime Video, as well as streaming services from cable network giants. Amazon expanded Prime Video to over 200 regions last year. The company has been aggressively securing rights for content to beef up its catalog.

But this doesn’t necessarily worry Netflix’s co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings. Giving HBO as an example, Hastings said even as Netflix has grown, HBO hasn’t seen a decline in its paying userbase.

"I’m not sure what (Amazon does) will really affect us," he said. Hastings also made it clear that unlike Amazon Prime Video, Netflix has no intentions of getting into live streaming of sporting events.

"That is not a strategy that we think is smart for us since we believe we can earn more viewing and satisfaction from spending that money on movies and TV shows," he said. Earlier this month Amazon secured a deal to stream NFL Thursday Night Football games.

Before he signaled the interviewees to end the session, Hastings let us all in on how he sees the future of Netflix, a service that is streaming a little more than one billion hours of content per week.

"We’re competing with sleep on the margin," Hastings said.

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