Hastings said it would be difficult to tell when Covid would not make its presence felt in the company’s numbers. In 2020, for example, the company added nearly 26 million subscribers in the first half of the year, but only two million more the rest of the year. “You can’t come off the craziness of Covid and be confident in the next two years,” Hastings said. “We’re going to push really hard.
, which has been deemed by critics to be transphobic and capable of causing real-world harm. The company has backed the comedian but only managed to exacerbate the trouble in recent days.
“Remember, we’re a few years behind in the film business from where we are with our TV business” in terms of when original titles began, Co-CEO and content chief Ted Sarandos responded. The company started making “meaningful-budget films” only “about three years ago,” he added, and in that time frame has released five Best Picture Oscar nominees.
Sarandos said he doesn’t have “any doubt” that “we’ll see that kind of excitement in the culture around the movies as we have with our TV shows over time. It’s interesting that people love to talk about their favorite show in a different way than they do about movies. It’s just a little bit louder.
Creating games “is this alchemy of a whole variety of stuff, where you have engineering, you have the design and the story and you have sort of a data element,” Peters said. It’s a “whole different muscle” for the company to develop, he acknowledged. But original programming has existed for less than a decade, he added, and has steadily improved in a fairly short time.