
LOS GATOS, CA – Netflix saw its second quarter subscriber growth slow to a trickle by its standards, a phenomena that it blamed on negative press coverage of its price hikes.
In a note to shareholders that included the company’s financial results, Netflix said that subscriber churn “ticked up slightly and unexpectedly”, coincident with April’s news of its plan to phase in price increases to some of its earliest subscribers.
“We think some members perceived the news as an impending new price increase rather than the completion of two years of grandfathering”, reads the note. “While un-grandfathering and associated media coverage may moderate near-term membership growth, we believe that un-grandfathering will provide us with more revenue to invest in our content to satisfy members, thus driving long-term growth.”
The streaming service added 1.68 million subscribers in the period, including 160,000 in the U.S. and 1.52 million internationally, but those figures fell short of its internal forecasts plus were considerably lower than the 3.28 million customers it added in Q2 2015. Netflix now has 83.2 million subscribers worldwide.
Revenues for the period were $2.11 billion, up from $1.64 billion during the same quarter in 2015, while net income of $40.7 million grew from the $26.3 million reported for the same period a year earlier.
“While we did not grow as fast as forecast in Q2, we are optimistic about the future owing to our singular focus, global scale and the growth of Internet TV viewing”, continues the shareholder note. “We are in the very early days of the shift from linear television to on-demand viewing and there are nearly 1 billion pay TV subscribers worldwide who will migrate to Internet TV over the coming decades.”