Netflix hits 50m global subscribers as profits double
Streaming video may not have supplanted broadcast TV, DVD or Blu-ray quite yet, but it appears to be well on its way.
Online TV and movie streaming service Netflix announced this week that it now had more than 50 million subscribers in more than 40 countries worldwide.
Releasing its results for the second quarter of 2014 on Monday, Netflix also said that its profits had more than doubled.
The company revealed that its net profits rose to $71m (£41.5m) from $29m in the same period last year.
Revenues grew to $1.34bn, up 36.9 per cent from the same period last year with international streaming contributing $307m as it added an extra 1.69m users between March and June.
In a promising development ahead of a European push, two-thirds of those new customers lived outside the US. Netflix said that it would launch in Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg in September.
Netflix’s growth has been helped by original series such as House of Cards and the Emmy-nominated Orange is the New Black.
In a letter to shareholders on Monday, Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings and chief financial officer David Wells, said: “This launch into markets with over 60 million broadband households will significantly increase our European presence and raise our current international addressable market to over 180 million broadband households, or [twice] the number of current US broadband households.”
Some customers still prefer to go old-school though – Netflix said it still had 6.3 million members of its DVD-by-mail business.
A spokeswoman for Netflix’s biggest competitor in the online streaming market, Amazon Prime, said that while the company could confirm that it had tens of millions of Prime members, Amazon did not share specifics when it came to exact subscriber numbers.
