The Netflix Decade: The Entertainment Industry Disruptor Closes In On 100 Million Worldwide Subscribers

A week ago we were celebrating the 10th anniversary of Apple’s iPhone, a device that so completely revolutionized personal technology, communications and media that many labeled it The iPhone Decade. A few weeks from now, Netflix will get a similar feting with the 10th anniversary of its streaming service that has created and dominated its own category — streaming video on demand — in what you could term The Netflix Decade.

So, which one gets the honors: iPhone or Netflix?

They’re both iconic, global brands. They’ve both intuitive, design-forward products that have continued to get better with each iteration. They’ve both made their respective companies billions and billions of dollars. Apple has sold more than 1 billion iPhones and Netflix will likely hit 100 million worldwide subscribers sometime in the first half of 2017, so Apple has the edge on the number of people impacts.

But here’s a case for the last ten years as The Netflix Decade:

• At a time when newer streaming services like Acorn TV (British shows) and Seeso (comedy shows) are going after consumers with narrow scopes, Netflix continues to add millions of subscribers every quarter by offering movies and TV shows that appeal across genres — scripted comedy and drama, documentary films and docuseries, stand-up comedy specials, animation, etc.
• Netflix is a big component in the disruption of the TV bundle, which is losing 1 million U.S. subscribers a year, as consumers decide they can jettison their satellite or cable package as many people did with their home phones when smartphones started becoming ubiquitous a decade before. Netflix cracked the industry and consumer assumption that you can’t live without a bundled TV package, and now 20 percent of American households are doing just that. And it’s available all the time on every device.
• Netflix makes all of its shows commercial-free, invented the concept of binge TV viewing, and has ingrained both into consumer viewing behavior on broadcast, cable and premium cable. Cable networks have reduced their ad loads, CBS All Access and Hulu came out with ad-free options, and shows like TBS’s Search Party and Freeform’s Beyond have recently posted all of their episodes online even before they aired on linear TV.
• Although its success in DVDs was (and still is) based on the ubiquity of its catalog, Netflix’s streaming business has increasingly focused its $6 billion annual content budget on delivering its own movies and TV shows instead of being a warehouse for shows that haven’t been on TV in years. Netflix’s catalog still includes some of those, but it has shifted its focus over the last several years to delivering new films and TV shows that have become their own global brands.
• In an environment where broadcast TV no longer dominates news and entertainment and the major social-media apps — Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — have become highly personalized silos that focus precisely and exhaustively on what kinds of news and opinions you want to see, Netflix can deliver a national (Making a Murderer) and sometimes global (The Crown) water-cooler experience.

“Shows like Luke Cage and Narcos travel really well around the world,” Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos said Wednesday afternoon in a video conference with Wall Street analysts after Netflix announced its quarterly earnings. “A nice upside is something like Gilmore Girls, which you’d think would be incredibly domestic in its popularity, but we found it to be incredibly internationally popular as well.”

Netflix premiered Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life over Thanksgiving weekend to massive U.S. and international media coverage and said in the earnings announcement today that it was a top 10 show in every one of its more than 190 global markets and has made similar splashes with other high-profile shows. And Netflix can still surprise with unknown properties. Stranger Things and The OA both became cultural phenomena last year with no advance press or expectations.

“We have multiple seasons of our shows, and we see that the audience continues to build cumulatively,” Netflix CFO David Wells said during the conference call. “In Q2 of this year, we have new seasons of a lot of our very popular shows like Orange Is the New Black, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Bloodline, Sense8, Master of None, and we think they will have a nice impact on survivor growth as well.”

Sarandos followed that comment with a longer-arc perspective: “The baseline demand is from the transition to internet TV and the overall convenience of it. Brand new shows, if they’re having to punch into the consciousness of the consumer, they don’t tend to draw new subscribers in greater numbers than our existing shows. In the first quarter we have The OA still doing well, but it doesn’t tend to draw numbers like House of Cards did last year.”

You come to the service for big hitters like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, and you stay for discoveries like Stranger Things and The OA. By the time you finish those, there’s another new show and then another and then new seasons of House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black.

When Netflix begins its second decade of streaming in February, it will do so with a dominant and still growing presence of nearly 100 million global subscribers, with new seasons of some of the most popular shows on TV, and new shows you probably don’t even know about yet. (Have you heard about Santa Clarita Diet? Drew Barrymore kills people and eats them. Good show. Starts February 3.)

Whether or not the last ten years was The Netflix Decade, there’s a good chance the next ten years will be.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.

Watch 'Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life' on Netflix