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Netflix plans to add signature flourishes to its live broadcasts of two Christmas Day NFL games, but remains circumspect about paying billions for major sports rights.
That was the view from Co-CEO Greg Peters, who covered sports, advertising and a couple of other topics in a 25-minute appearance Friday at the FT Business of Entertainment Summit.
“We look at the two Christmas Day NFL games as more like an event kind of thing, where for one day football will be on Netflix,” Peters said. “Hopefully, those will be amazing games and we’ll all be talking about what’s going on there. And we plan to ‘Netflix-ify’ them a little bit, so we’ll plan to have a little bit of stuff around the games with our talent and stuff like that that will hopefully make it super-fun.”
As enthusiastic as the company is about sports (as evidenced by ongoing investments in unscripted properties like Drive to Survive, Full Swing and many others, top execs have concerns about making the math work. “Having Thursday Night Football or the NBA or things like that, we’d love to do those things. It would be amazing,” Peters said. “We also want to do it in a way that works for the business and those have been typically challenging deals to go and do and make it work for the business.”
With the three-year NFL Christmas pact, the acquisition of WWE Raw and the 2023 debut of its own self-produced live golf event, “certainly we’re poking at the edges” of a full-scale live sports component, Peters acknowledged. “Maybe we’ll figure out a way but we haven’t figured out a way yet.” With most major rights locked up for several more years, “there’s not really the opportunity for quite some time,” he noted. Nevertheless, “I’ve learned from advertising and all these other things that you should not rule out these things categorically. There may come a time, but no plans at this point.”
Speaking of advertising, Peters recounted the process by which Netflix mounted its push into the ad market after years of “wrestling” internally with the matter. When subscriber growth “hit a wall” in 2021 and early 2022, he recalled, sentiment shifted inside the company and the “desperate situation” prompted immediate action. For years, co-founder and Executive Chairman Reed Hastings and other execs insisted Netflix would never carry ads, citing privacy issues and the customer experience, among other factors.
Peters said there were lasting takeaways from the “stressful but also super-fun” six-month sprint to stand up the Basic with Ads tier.
One significant one was the lean and focused nature of the team of employees working on the project. Peters estimated that only about a half-dozen staffers started out on the ad mission, with the group expanding to about 40 or more over time.
“It was an opportunity to go back to our start-up DNA and our start-up roots,” Peters said. People on the “kernel of a team” working on ads were told “Do not add anyone to this team unless you absolutely need them to deliver on the initial launch. It was ‘keep it as lean as possible.’ And it worked out incredibly well. … What I took away from it was that this is a mode of operation that we as a company need to maintain.”
Nearly two years after the launch of advertising, Netflix has reported 40 million monthly active users of the ad tier. The availability of the cheaper plan has driven better-than-expected subscriber growth, with the company adding 8 million subscribers in the quarter ended June 30. At the same time, the company warned in July that advertising will not be a primary revenue engine until 2026.
“Our ad business is growing nicely and is becoming a more meaningful contributor to our business,” Netflix said in its quarterly investor letter. “But building a business from scratch takes time – and coupled with the large size of our subscription revenue – we don’t expect advertising to be a primary driver of our revenue growth in 2024 or 2025.”
