Media & Entertainment

Netflix loses 970,000 subscribers, its largest quarterly loss ever

Comment

Neon Netflix sign in window
Image Credits: Netflix

During the three-month period ending June 30, Netflix reported a loss of only 970,000 subscribers. Last quarter, the company had a weak outlook for the second quarter and predicted a net loss of two million subscribers. While today’s results beat the projection, it is still the largest quarterly loss in the company’s history.

The company reported a total of 220.67 million subscribers and said it expects to add one million in the third quarter.

Netflix has spent a couple of months adjusting its business strategy to prepare for the challenges it expects to face. The company laid off around 450 employees, announced a cheaper ad-supported subscription plan with a new partnership with Microsoft and put its foot down on password sharing.

Today, Netflix announced in its letter to shareholders that it will launch the ad-supported tier in the early part of 2023. Also, next year will see the official rollout of the paid sharing offering.

Netflix announced yesterday it is testing an “add a home” feature that will charge an extra $3 to share accounts with other households.

Netflix partners with Microsoft for its ad-supported plan

Netflix to test a new ‘add a home’ option to charge for password sharing

If you’ve been following our streaming coverage, then you know that Netflix is having a horrible year. In April, the company reported that it had lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022 — the first big loss in over a decade.

This year, Netflix’s stock was on a decline of approximately 70%. The market valuation has decreased from $300 billion to under $90 billion in less than a year. After the company reported it lost fewer subscribers than anticipated, Netflix shares increased 8%.

In addition to its shortcomings, the streamer received fewer Emmy nominations this month than HBO and HBO Max, even though it featured more programming. HBO picked up 140 nominations to Netflix’s 105, a number that emphasizes the downfall in quality entertainment for the streaming giant.

Season four of Stranger Things was a big hit amongst subscribers as the company touted it was the most streamed English-language show in its history with 1.3 billion hours viewed.

Netflix is betting on a more robust slate of content to accelerate growth. The new season of The Crown and the whopping $200 million budgeted action movie The Gray Man, starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, will appear on the platform soon. The company also revealed a new Squid Game reality game show that will feature the biggest cash prize and largest cast in reality TV history.

On the gaming front, Netflix released the mobile game Into the Breach today. The new title is great for pocket gamers that enjoy strategy games with enemies, battles, and more.

The streaming service currently has more than 22 games available and plans to have 50 titles by the end of 2022, including ones tied to Netflix’s popular TV shows The Queen’s Gambit, Shadow and Bone and Too Hot to Handle.

More TechCrunch

Mike Krieger, one of the co-founders of Instagram and, more recently, the co-founder of personalized news app Artifact (which TechCrunch corporate parent Yahoo recently acquired), is joining Anthropic as the…

Anthropic hires Instagram co-founder as head of product

Seven orgs so far have signed on to standardize the way data is collected and shared.

Venture orgs form alliance to standardize data collection

As cloud adoption continues to surge towards the $1 trillion mark in annual spend, we’re seeing a wave of enterprise startups gaining traction with customers and investors for tools to…

Alkira connects with $100M for a solution that connects your clouds

Charging has long been the Achilles’ heel of electric vehicles. One startup thinks it has a better way for apartment dwelling EV drivers to charge overnight.

Orange Charger thinks a $750 outlet will solve EV charging for apartment dwellers

So did investors laugh them out of the room when they explained how they wanted to replace Quickbooks? Kind of.

Embedded accounting startup Layer secures $2.3M toward goal of replacing Quickbooks

While an increasing number of companies are investing in AI, many are struggling to get AI-powered projects into production — much less delivering meaningful ROI. The challenges are many. But…

Weka raises $140M as the AI boom bolsters data platforms

PayHOA, a previously bootstrapped Kentucky-based startup that offers software for self-managed homeowner associations (HOAs), is an example of how real-world problems can translate into opportunity. It just raised a $27.5…

Meet PayHOA, a profitable and once-bootstrapped SaaS startup that just landed a $27.5M Series A

Restaurant365, which offers a restaurant management suite, has raised a hot $175M from ICONIQ Growth, KKR and L Catterton.

Restaurant365 orders in $175M at $1B+ valuation to supersize its food service software stack 

Venture firm Shilling has launched a €50M fund to support growth-stage startups in its own portfolio and to invest in startups everywhere else. 

Portuguese VC firm Shilling launches €50M opportunity fund to back growth-stage startups

Chang She, previously the VP of engineering at Tubi and a Cloudera veteran, has years of experience building data tooling and infrastructure. But when She began working in the AI…

LanceDB, which counts Midjourney as a customer, is building databases for multimodal AI

Trawa simplifies energy purchasing and management for SMEs by leveraging an AI-powered platform and downstream data from customers. 

Berlin-based trawa raises €10M to use AI to make buying renewable energy easier for SMEs

Lydia is splitting itself into two apps — Lydia for P2P payments and Sumeria for those looking for a mobile-first bank account.

Lydia, the French payments app with 8 million users, launches mobile banking app Sumeria

Cargo ships docking at a commercial port incur costs called “disbursements” and “port call expenses.” This might be port dues, towage, and pilotage fees. It’s a complex patchwork and all…

Shipping logistics startup Harbor Lab raises $16M Series A led by Atomico

AWS has confirmed its European “sovereign cloud” will go live by the end of 2025, enabling greater data residency for the region.

AWS confirms will launch European ‘sovereign cloud’ in Germany by 2025, plans €7.8B investment over 15 years

Go Digit, an Indian insurance startup, has raised $141 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, ADIA, and Morgan Stanley as part of its IPO.

Indian insurance startup Go Digit raises $141M from anchor investors ahead of IPO

Peakbridge intends to invest in between 16 and 20 companies, investing around $10 million in each company. It has made eight investments so far.

Food VC Peakbridge has new $187M fund to transform future of food, like lab-made cocoa

For over six decades, the nonprofit has been active in the financial services sector.

Accion’s new $152.5M fund will back financial institutions serving small businesses globally

Meta’s newest social network, Threads, is starting its own fact-checking program after piggybacking on Instagram and Facebook’s network for a few months.

Threads finally starts its own fact-checking program

Looking Glass makes trippy-looking mixed-reality screens that make things look 3D without the need of special glasses. Today, it launches a pair of new displays, including a 16-inch mode that…

Looking Glass launches new 3D displays

Replacing Sutskever is Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and longtime chief scientist, departs

Intuitive Machines made history when it became the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon, so it makes sense to adapt that tech for Mars.

Intuitive Machines wants to help NASA return samples from Mars

As Google revamps itself for the AI era, offering AI overviews within its search results, the company is introducing a new way to filter for just text-based links. With the…

Google adds ‘Web’ search filter for showing old-school text links as AI rolls out

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket will take a crew to suborbital space for the first time in nearly two years later this month, the company announced on Tuesday.  The NS-25…

Blue Origin to resume crewed New Shepard launches on May 19

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

In the coming months, Google says it will open up the Gemini Nano model to more developers.

Patreon and Grammarly are already experimenting with Gemini Nano, says Google

As part of the update, Reddit also launched a dedicated AMA tab within the web post composer.

Reddit introduces new tools for ‘Ask Me Anything,’ its Q&A feature

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

LearnLM is already powering features across Google products, including in YouTube, Google’s Gemini apps, Google Search and Google Classroom.

LearnLM is Google’s new family of AI models for education