The folks at Netflix are big sports fans—but don't expect the company to fight to own a league's full-season rights.
Executives at the streaming giant, which late Tuesday reported quarterly results and a fresh outlook that has Netflix (NFLX) stock jumping today, cited live events like the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight and the Christmas Day NFL games it showed as key reasons its fourth-quarter content "outperformed even our high expectations."
Live programming was also named among its top priorities for the year ahead.
"We're not focusing on acquiring rights to large regular season sports packages," the company said, noting its interest in sports but also comedy. "Rather, our live strategy is all about delivering can't-miss, special event programming. … Although our live programming will likely be a small percentage of our total view hours and content expense, we think the eventized nature will result in outsized value to both our members and our business."
Sports continues to be a battleground in the video space, with outlets coming and going and companies fighting to own rights to content they see as particularly valuable.
In listing some of last year's top events seen as helping streaming organizations acquire new members, Antenna named Paul-Tyson among those attracting more than 1 million sign-ups.
On a conference call Tuesday, Netflix executives sought to downplay suggestions that sports had an outsize effect on subscriptions. "Our estimates for subscriber adds driven by [the boxing match, NFL games and the "Squid Game" series] combined represent a small minority of our total member acquisition in the quarter," co-CEO Greg Peters said on the call, a transcript of which was made available by AlphaSense.
The events were a success, executives said, but "it doesn't change the underlying economics of full-season Big League sports being extremely challenging," co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on the call. "Right now, we believe that the live events business is where we really want to be and sports is a very important part of that but it is a part of that expansion."
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