According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, has admitted to the Netflix viewership only growing two percent in the half of 2026. Sarandos says in an interview for Bloomberg’s 2026 screentime event that the streaming service’s plan to moving fast in its engagement growth hasn’t gone well.
Sarandos tells how Netflix spends five percent of its $20 billion annual content investment, generating about one percent of viewership. The service’s one possible engagement could move through live programming, including in NFL games. Netflix has also generated signups to help in reducing subscriber churn.
Though Sarandos says the business is doing alright, questions arise if the streaming service is growing fast enough with the $111 billion merge of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery as a new threat in the marketplace. Sarandos doesn’t seem to regret Netflix’s temporary decision of winning Warner Bros.—without Discovery. He says, “I think the plan was solid. We won the deal at some point, so we think we priced it right – at our scale. That was the top price point where I thought we could return value to our shareholders with the asset. Any more than that, I thought we’d taking it into negative territory – even with our scale.” It remains still undetermined of how much the threat will fabricate the streaming company.
Netflix made an agreement before David Ellison, who combined Paramount Global and Skydance from a check made out by his father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison. At one time Netflix was trying to become more like Warner Bros.’ HBO while HBO was trying to become more like Netflix. Now Youtubers have worked in the same way as Netflix but their deals with YouTube creators had no defined change for its streaming company. Sarandos says that Netflix won’t offer a free tier anytime in the near future unlike with Youtubers who’ve found advertiser-funding on their channels and platforms.