Okay, everybody. Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us. I'm John Hodulik, the telecom and media analyst here at UBS. I'm pleased to announce our next speakers are Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos, the co-CEOs of Netflix. Good to be here, guys.
Pleasure, yeah.
Thanks for taking time out of what's definitely a busy schedule for you throughout the day.
Busy-ish, yeah.
So we've got 35 minutes for Q&A, and I figured we'll just dig right in. Paramount Skydance is now offering an alternative bid to Warner Bros. shareholders. What are your thoughts?
I would say that.
Good opener. Go right for it.
It looks good. Today's move was entirely expected. We have a deal done, and we are incredibly happy with the deal. We think it's great for our shareholders. We think it's great for consumers. We think it's a great way to create and protect jobs in the entertainment industry. We're super confident we're going to get it across the line and finish. So we're excited.
Obviously, Warner Bros. is a significant deal for you guys and for the media industry.
Yeah.
Help us understand the rationale for the transaction and the benefits to both members and shareholders of the combination?
Yeah. One, we recognize that this is unexpected. We haven't done this before. So maybe just walk you through a little bit of how we think this creates value and sort of also how we get to there and think about what's the executability of all the theories that we've built into the case, and so we've broken it down essentially into three phases, and it's worth noting that phase one is essentially between now and close. In phase one, our job is to continue to grow our business. We've got a tremendous opportunity for organic growth that we still are very, very excited about, and our job is essentially to execute against that, and we think that that's relatively low risk. We know how to go do that. By the way, Warner Bros. will be doing the same in parallel as well.
Then you get into the close period. We see essentially this is where we saw two really big centers of value that we believe are highly executable and we can implement in this phase. The first part is there's a bunch of titles that the Warner teams have that we think that there's more value to unlock in. We think we have exactly the platform to go do that. We've got incredible reach. We've got a proven experience that maximizes the value and content. This isn't the business that we are in. Essentially, we are constantly in the business of evaluating various different licensing opportunities for titles and then trying to figure out how do we maximize the value of that asset on our platform. Again, that's something we do day in and day out and we think is relatively low risk to execute.
The other component is around HBO, the brand and the service, and HBO is an incredible brand with an incredible history. It speaks prestige TV. We want to double down on that concept, and then we think that that gives us an additional lever, additional tool essentially to think about how do we propose plans and offerings for different consumers that give them the right kind of entertainment they want at the right price point, and we think that we are in the business of doing that kind of optimization. And it sounds like that might be hard to go do, but recognize we've just done that. We've done that with our ads plan as an example. We've had to think about how do you compose a set of offerings that maximize value for the business while keeping consumers happy with different offerings.
So we see that again as completely executable. And we know how to iterate and solve that problem as well. And just to be clear, when we sort of built our valuation model and sort of set the price, those are the centers of value that we really put into that. And so we felt like, hey, we can go achieve on these things. There's a third phase, which is where you get into, yeah, we've got an amazing IP and all sorts of things that we can go deliver on this. We believe we're very confident that there's things we're going to unlock that have value there. We actually don't know exactly what those are. So we didn't give ourselves credit for them in the valuation model. So we think we've been appropriately conservative about building value where we think we can actually go deliver it.
We think we can deliver more. There's upside in the deal at the end of the day. But we're super excited on being able to deliver on those pieces.
Yeah. And I would just add to that, obviously, there's the direct-to-consumer streaming business, which we're deeply committed to for both companies. The consumers love it. I think it's something that we're quite good at. In this transaction, we pick up three businesses basically that we're not currently in. So meaning we have no redundancies currently. But one of them is the motion picture studio with a theatrical distribution machine. And so there's been a lot of speculation on what we would do with this. And I think it's really important to note that we haven't talked at all about what we're going to do with this. But what we are going to do with this is we're deeply committed to releasing those movies exactly the way they'd release those movies today. All three of these new businesses, we want to keep operating largely as they are.
The theatrical business, we've not talked a lot about it in the past about wanting to do it because we've never been in that business. If when this deal closes, we are in that business. And we're going to do it. So think about it. If we did this deal 24 months ago, all of those movies we saw this year do so well at the box office for Warner Bros. would have been released in the same way in theaters. I'm talking about Minecraft. I'm talking about Superman. I'm talking about Weapons. All those movies that are winners. These movies will be released on Netflix through theaters the way that Warner Bros. did it before, but with the Warner Bros. operating entity. We think it's really important the way that they create and the way that they drive value. We didn't buy this company to destroy that value.
The second one is the television studio who produce and license content to third parties. Also, we were never in that business. We are now. And I think it's an important thing that we get under the hood. That's a really healthy business. It's not as big as ours. And that's why we haven't really focused that much on doing it. The growth opportunity in our core business has been greater. But now in this transaction, we own that business. And Channing and that group do a phenomenal job. And we want them to continue to do that phenomenal job. And then HBO is another example of that, which is, as Greg said, this is a prestige television brand that people really love. And I would say that they have been doing gymnastics to make themselves into a general entertainment brand.
I think under this transaction, they don't have to do that anymore. We're already a very well-established general entertainment brand. And we want HBO to double down on the things that people have loved for 50 years about HBO, the fact that prestige television and movies in the various pay-TV windows. These are the things that we're going to keep going in this business. And I think when we looked at the whole deal, you'd see that their assets work better in our business model. And our business model works better with these assets.
Got it. That's clear. Regulatory approval is obviously a big question we're getting. How the market is defined is a big part of that process. How do you define the market? And what gives you the confidence the deal gets approved?
Yeah. I think we'd want to start by saying it's not our position to tell the regulators how to think about this. The regulators have to do their work and define the market in a way that they think is right. Clearly, they'll do their analysis. And we'll support them with whatever they need in that regard. But if we go back to the fundamentals of this deal, we are very confident that regulators should and will approve it. At the end of the day, it's pro-consumer, delivers more value to those folks. It's pro-creator. We're going to increase our content spend and deliver more. That's great for them. That means it drives jobs. It's pro-workers in that regard. It's pro-growth. It's pro-innovation. So we think we've got a good story for all the constituents that we have.
And then if you step back, and we brought the slide around just to sort of talk about.
I'm feeling this might come up.
Yeah, exactly. We thought that this might be a topic. We just want to really bring the facts to this conversation because if you look at Nielsen, this is Nielsen number of view hours on TV in the U.S. You can look at your left right there. We're sixth in the current ranking right now. We're behind YouTube. We're behind Disney. We're behind NBCUniversal. We're behind Fox. We're behind Paramount. And then if you say, "Okay, well, you're going to go buy HBO and HBO Max, put that viewing on the list," this is what that would look like. We go from 8% of view hours today in the United States to 9%. We're still behind YouTube at 13%. And potentially worth noting that we would be behind what would be if Paramount combined with WBD, them at 14%.
We think that there's a really strong fundamentals-based case here for why regulators should approve this deal.
Okay.
I'm going to pick it up from there.
I was going to say, how should we think about the president's recent comment?
Yeah. I think you should think the President cares deeply about American industry, and he loves the entertainment industry. I've talked to him many times since the election about the different challenges facing the entertainment industry. He definitely understands the dynamics of what we were just talking about. Television is a very broad landscape of, and view hours is probably the best way to capture it. What people are watching on TV, it might be cable, which we do not own any cable channels, or it might be a network, which we do not own a broadcast network, and it might be streaming, and these things trade off pretty broadly. I would say it's very important that what the President has been interested in in this deal has been to what extent does it protect and create jobs in America.
He understands what we do, which is that we drive a ton of great work in America. Our original productions have employed 140,000 people since 2020- 2024. Our economic contribution to the U.S. economy in that production has been about $125 billion. We are producing in all 50 states. We've used 500 independent production companies to make content for us, about roughly 1,000 original projects. Beyond just the jobs, we're also investing in the entertainment ecosystem. We're spending $1 billion building a studio in New Jersey right now built on the old Fort Monmouth military base that's been empty for about 13 years. It's revitalizing the economy all over that area. We have 11 films in production right now in New Jersey. We have a fully running studio we built in New Mexico. It's been a great job center and a great jobs training center.
We've got many of our shows that we're shooting there. So we continue to invest in this. And again, I think that the president's interests in this are the same as ours, which is to create and protect jobs. In this merger that in the offer that Paramount was talking about today, the Ellisons were talking about $6 billion of synergies. Where do you think synergies come from? Cutting jobs. So we're not cutting jobs. We're making jobs.
Makes sense. So up until this deal, the company and its strategy has been very simple and straightforward. Do all these benefits outweigh the increasing complexity you're going to experience by putting these two companies together?
Look, I think we built this company on a very simple proposition. We actually had one SKU for the longest time.
Right. One model.
One model. And that helped us build a really strong foundation. And the idea of that was you build a really strong foundation. And then you can introduce new complexities to the business for future growth. And we have now been doing that pretty successfully, I think, by doing things that people would argue are pretty complicated.
We've never done before either.
We haven't done any of them before, so the simplicity of, remember, we started making original series, our first original series. We weren't doing movies then. We weren't doing unscripted then. We weren't doing international originals then, and now we do all those things very successfully, and producing in 50 countries today is pretty complicated. Greg, you've talked about this ingest model that we've been doing with TF1. I think it's
something new that's been fresh as well. I mean, it's involved standing up whole new businesses that we've never done before. We've never done live before. We've never done ads before, so all great examples of us extending that core foundation and building on top of it.
Being nimble. Like I said, I do think that simplicity was an early superpower, I think, of ours. And today, I think it's enabled us to do things that are really much more complicated, but also chase bigger prizes.
I think we still want to be choosy. We've always been from the perspective of you do a small number of things, but you really do them to win. And that's sort of the same angle that we're taking towards this opportunity as well.
It seems like a lot of the initiatives that you've had are sort of reaching their, not conclusion, but you're far enough along the ad side. You're far enough along on other businesses. There's more room in terms of management.
I think all these things would benefit from all those things.
There may be two statements saying that. One of our core theories has been that everything extension we do has got to have leverage from the core and lever back in success, right? And you say we're far from done. I actually think of it quite the other way. I look at it as we've reached sort of escape velocity on some of them. But there's that middle part of the growth yet that's still to come.
Makes sense. Now, I realize it's early in the process, but has there been any talk about management continuity within the Warner Bros. assets, just given all the talent there?
Yeah. I mean, and it goes a little bit back to our core theory and why we like this deal so much because we really do see it as a complementary situation. If you think about the core business units that exist inside Warners that we would be acquiring, we don't have those units right now. So we don't have the redundancy issue. We're not trying to consolidate, drop down one studio to two studios to one. That's not the business we're in. And so actually, we love these businesses. We like the leadership. We've got very strong people that are in charge of that. We, as Ted said, we anticipate executing and running those businesses as they are. Again, there are businesses that we looked at before. And we weren't opposed to it. We had other things to go do.
We had a long list of things that felt like were higher priorities for us. But now that we have mature, well-functioning units coming as part of this, we're excited to have those be run by their leaders, operate well. And we think there's a ton we're going to learn from them about operating them.
I think back to what you kind of said earlier, but I think this idea that we're not collapsing the studio. We are actually strengthening one of the most iconic studios in Hollywood by giving them a healthier business model to operate in and continue to release movies into the world larger like they do right now.
I mean.
Just pivoting on that, the combined company will have about $30 billion in combined content spend per year, making you by far the biggest spender in terms of entertainment content. How should we think about the content strategy for the company post-deal, both in terms of how the money is spent and then how the content is distributed?
Well, look, I think the beauty of this model has been that it scales. And I think when you look at it and say, what has been the strategy is to continue to generate more joy for our members, that that pays back in retention and word of mouth and all the positive benefits to a subscription business. But to do that, you have to have great content, a lot of things to watch. And that's what we keep investing into. So that $30 billion, it's a big number for sure. But it's like we've been growing organically to that number prior to this transaction. We're going to get there faster.
After the transaction, we're going to continue to grow on that trajectory, giving them the, as we improve distribution of those other titles and those other assets in the Warner Bros. library, we're able to then continue to reinvest because we're pleasing members more and more and more. They see more and more value in the business.
Getting more leverage off of those assets as well.
Correct. And then we do pick up some other distribution systems that we didn't do before. But those are very healthy businesses. They're just not as big as the direct-to-consumer streaming business. But they're very healthy. And we want to keep them going.
They're additive.
Yeah.
100%.
Yeah. All right. Maybe pivoting away from the deal, and we'll come back to it a bit. How would you describe the.
I would only add to that everyone else has been kicked around in this transaction have all been reducing their content spend, have all been laying people off and cutting things. We're investing into it. Like I said, we're growing organically closer to that $30 billion as it is, and we want to continue to grow.
The plan is not to synergize through.
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. There's plenty of room, as Greg just showed how small we are relative to the rest of the universe.
Makes sense.
So maybe looking a little bit more near term, how would you describe the slate for 4Q and as you look out to 2026?
Well, hopefully, some folks in this room are watching Stranger Things right now. So we've had a really strong Q4, obviously Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein nominated for the Globe this morning, which we're super proud of. A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE , which is fantastic. And we have a new season. Before the year is out, we still have two more drops of Stranger Things coming, a new season of Emily in Paris, Wake Up Dead Man, which is the new Knives Out movie. That's all between now and just the end of the year. So we're really excited about Q4. And both, I think, are some of our core brands, a lot of new titles as well that people are getting really excited about. And Wake Up Dead Man, as you know, we've had this incredible kind of run with this franchise.
And this one will be. We tinkered around a bit with different theatrical models with this one too. And I think it'll be a different way for people to get more and more excited about it. But it's this healthy mix of our core brands and returning brands and all new titles coming up too. And do you want me to go to 26? Because we're just happy about 26 too because we're going into. We have Narnia from Greta Gerwig that we're really excited about. We've got new movies from Charlize Theron, Apex. We've got The Rip with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. And Matt also did another movie that'll come out later in the year called Animals. It's incredible. And we've got returning seasons of Bridgerton and One Piece and Beef and a bunch of the brands that people really, really love.
We're excited about 26 outside of this transaction.
Got it. Okay. So we track the top 10 list pretty closely. And it looks like you've had some nice momentum in non-English titles this year, even outside of Squid Game. Where do you see the most untapped potential for locally produced content that can resonate globally? And does the deal sort of allow you to lean into that?
Oh, for sure. I think a lot of these brands developing local language versioning for sure and spinoffs and exploring IP that hasn't yet been explored from the library in different countries around the world is exciting. I think what's really exciting about the local language success, to your point about you were talking about, I'm sure, the Squid Game success earlier this year, which spawned a big growth of excitement around K-dramas. You'd be remiss not to talk about KPop Demon Hunters, but it's not that. It complemented each other for sure, but what's been really exciting is the cultural impact. Because I think we talk a lot about the Netflix effect in the U.S., and we all see it here a lot, but there's things like Culinary Class Wars in Korea. Prior to that show, the notion of a celebrity chef did not exist in Korea.
So that's a big cause of a whole new craze about the restaurant industry because of the success of this show. And Physical: 100, again, because of that show's success, that show was bigger in multiple countries than any of the big unscripted shows from any other network because the people just really fell in love with the storytelling. And it's that kind of things that we learned about sports adjacency storytelling that has really helped us grow into all kinds of unscripted programming. And Physical: 100 was a brand new area for us. And the fact that it worked in that format and it's actually spinning off and doing multiple local formats of Physical: 100 as well.
All around the world.
Yeah. Imagine the Physical: 100 starting in Korea, but there's going to be an Italian one where they duke it out in the Colosseum.
The Roman Colosseum, yeah.
Yeah. But again, it's that cultural impact that you're able to have that we don't always see it in the U.S., outside of the U.S. But it's happening all over the world.
And also maybe live events. Is that another area that's obviously you've had a lot of success in live events before?
100%. Even before the end of this year, we've got a couple of big ones with the Jake Paul fight coming up on the 19th of December. And then we've got the all day of NFL football on Christmas Day. And then we're also ramping up. This will be the first time next year that we do local live programming for outside of the U.S. Again, we took a couple of years, learned it, learned the technology, learned the taste. Remember, it's a good investment. But because of the time zone, it's limited in its footprint. And I think by doing more local live programming, you get the benefits locally. We saw it a lot in the Canelo Crawford fight. It was huge in Mexico for us outside of the U.S. as well. But once you get pretty far out of the time zone, people are sleeping.
So that's why we'll grow that.
We'll do World Baseball Classic in Japan, which I think should be super exciting, and it's.
Women's World Cup.
Women's World Cup. You see the synergistic effects with other parts of our business around advertising as well. We feel that has that flywheel effect.
Exactly. That's a good pivot to advertising.
It seems like the company upticks on advertising this quarter, saying it'll more than double this year. What's driving that? And what does the Warner Bros. deal do for that revenue?
Yeah. We're seeing great trajectory, which we're super excited about. You mentioned the more than doubling. At the end of the day, we're giving advertisers what they need, which is increasing reach. We're giving them a more capable platform in terms of targeting, personalization, and measurement. We are giving them amazing brands that they could advertise alongside. And so that's really what's fueling it right now. When it gets to the Warner deal, I would say really it's around those titles driving more engagement, our ability to find more viewing for those titles. Obviously, it's connected to the advertising revenue that we can drive. And then just like our existing titles, a lot of those titles, they're incredible properties that advertisers want to be connected to and be alongside. And so I think that drives our core thesis around advertising as well.
Has the ad server lived up to expectations? Is it driving demand?
Yeah, our own ad stack. Yeah. It's incredible to be on our own ad stack because essentially we can now go incredibly quickly and run with high velocity. And we're delivering along essentially the dimensions we've talked about before, which is more demand sources. So we've added Amazon as a DSP. We've added AJA in Japan. It's better targeting, personalization, better measurement. We've got a good work we've been doing there. It's also new ad formats. So we're actually deploying interactive ad formats. And we'll continue that line of investment. But it just allows us to go even more quickly. And we've got a long list of the same kind of ads in 2026, more demand sources, measurement, targeting, more formats.
And then 2027, we start to move into a really fun space of sort of non-deterministic targeting model-based approaches that you've seen some of the bigger advertisers out there leverage to great effect. And so we're super excited about that at the end of the day too. And we just think this is, again, we see the velocity that we're getting. And we see we're going to be able to deliver more and more for our advertisers while making it a great experience for our members.
The tech stack in general is a big strength for you for Netflix. How are you incorporating Gen AI into the recommendation and making the product better?
Yeah. Maybe just start with this, that we've been in the AI and ML business for two decades. So we're well versed in how this works. We think that we're in a differentially well-suited position to take advantage of these newer generative approaches. Mostly that's because we've got scaled consumer-facing products, so a place to attach those technologies to, scaled business products. And we've got large sets of well-ordered data, which is sort of the fuel that allows those models and engines to work very well. So we're going to mostly deliver in, I'd say, three spaces. One, the first primary space is the member space, better personalization, the ability to deliver high-quality personalization against new content types. So as we expand the universe of content that we're serving, we'll be able to deliver high-quality personalization very quickly in those spaces. And then new types of consumer experiences.
So think about things like a conversational search experience where you can have a conversation with the UI and get discovery and get recommendations as a result. So super excited about that. Ads is a very rich space that we think we can deliver some of these technologies into as well, whether it's targeting. It's also things like modifying brand creative to fit in the title creative universe and make that a conversation and a process that happened in a very limited way before. It's very cumbersome. But now we can accelerate and expedite that process. And maybe the third area, the.
Creative side. I mean, the technology is obviously moving very fast. And we're trying to think about all the different ways that creative AI tools can help creators tell better stories. And I think it's very important when you think about AI's contribution to the creative process and the idea of what those outputs are. And I think it's very important for, and we can see that in the way people connect with content. It would be great if it improves some of the efficiencies of the production cycle. But the idea that it's just got to be faster and cheaper is not good enough. It has to be better first. And then if it's faster and cheaper, that's great. But if it is just faster and cheaper without being better, it's going to be bad for everybody.
So, I think right now what we're seeing is that those tools are iterating. We're iterating with them alongside of filmmakers who are excited to work with the technology and figure it out. And it's basically, we think about it much more akin to the advances in VFX and all those kind of things that have happened. The movie making is filled with technology. You'll probably see Avatar over Christmas. That's doing things that people couldn't have even dreamt about a couple of years ago and incorporating new technology into the creative storytelling process that we are enormously supportive of. And I don't think it works as a cost-cutting tool. I think you'll alienate audiences. And it'll be bad for everybody. Yeah.
Does AI, in your view, make short-form platforms more powerful and create more competition for Netflix in terms of engagement?
Look, there's a case to be made that's the opposite, is that more and more content is coming out that people are less and less attached to and less passionate about. The content creation starts with a great story, starts with great writing, all those kind of things that have to happen before audiences connect. We have a lot of things that you put in all those efforts. And people just go to the next one. And that's failure. But I would say what's happening now is that's built for people to go to the next one. And so I don't know that necessarily that it strengthens them for the long haul. It's interesting. It's fun. That probably adds to a level of freshness to it. But I don't know that it improves, in my earlier point, better, faster, and cheaper.
Ultimately, we believe that telling stories incredibly well, consistently, is a very scarce commodity out there. And we believe we've got the business model, the best business model for those creators. And so ultimately, we feel like they'll find their home at Netflix.
You'd have to fundamentally believe that all of us have a great story in us. I don't think we do. Sorry.
There's some evidence to support that.
There's a real skill there in being able to be a great writer and a great storyteller, and yeah.
So do you guys think AI enhances the value of IP and the library? I mean, over time, does it help you tell the stories better?
Yeah. You also have to be careful not to trash it with it. That's what I was getting at. I think it's really important that you apply it in a way that it helps consumers, it helps fans. It feeds fandom versus running the risk of destroying it.
I think that's right. But if you do think that there's this commodity layer of content, sea, ocean, universe out there, then what sets you apart? What differentiates you from that? And I think IP can do some of that work.
Maybe quickly on video games. Are the video game efforts scaling as you expected? And are they contributing to engagement and maybe subscriber growth to churn? Just lay that out for us.
Yeah. We've been doing a lot of work over the last couple of years. A lot of it has been, I'd say, in two categories: building plumbing, if you will, building the infrastructure to create development environments for people to author games and bring those games to the service. And a lot of work has actually been also understanding the strategy and sort of seeing, as we always say, you never know what you've got until you get out there with consumers and you figure it out. So we've learned a lot from that. Now we're at the point where we're really unlocking sort of the value of the strategic refinements that we've made, which have been super exciting. You see a couple of different categories that we're really going after.
We feel are consistent with the value we can deliver to members, which is differential, which is taking immersive narrative games that are based on IP that we have. So you can imagine fans of Squid Game going super deeper into that universe. It was actually fun because we did a fun game around golf, but not like I'd say an incredible masterpiece of a game around golf. And then with Happy Gilmore, you see all these people that are playing it. So you see that need there. Kids is another space. We think we can give a very safe space for kids, no in-app payments, no ads, and just give them a place to play there. Also taking story game IP and just finding another distribution range for that. We did it with Grand Theft Auto.
We just released Red Dead Redemption, which, as you can see, is topping the game charts on mobile. So that's another great example that's there. And the fourth one is what we think about as social games. This is like Family Game Night, Reinvented, or maybe even the extension of what used to be the game show, right? And we released a bunch of games on the TV that is designed for folks to sit around the TV with their phone as controller and play, think Boggle, Pictionary, LEGO. We're seeing really big take-up in that. And then we've got a new game, a quiz show game coming out, Best Guess, which is super exciting, which gets into that little bit of that game show space. And how do we bring interactivity into the linear world too? Because we see this real world is blending.
Now we're definitely seeing those numbers come up in terms of.
That's crossing games and live and all these other new skill sets that we're building on.
Back to thinking about all these things working together. Yeah.
Did you get a chance to play with any of the games at home that's over the?
Oh, yeah.
OK, you got one here?
You want to hear? Play any of the party games yet?
Take a chance.
There we go.
There we go. All right.
Right now, you'll have fun. You'll have fun.
Do the Warner Bros. assets enhance or accelerate the success in the gaming sector?
Yeah. It may be worth going back again to sort of how we thought about the deal and building our valuation model. While they've definitely been doing some great work in the game space, we actually didn't attribute any value to that from the get-go because they're relatively minor compared to the grand scheme of things. Now we're super excited because some of those properties that they've built, Hogwarts is a great example of that, have been done quite well. And we think that we can incorporate that into what we're offering. They've got great studios and great folks working there. So we think that there's definitely an opportunity there. But just to be clear, we haven't built that into our deal model.
Got it. And by the way, all those IP enhancements that will come from gaming would apply to all those IP projects.
That's a great point. Yeah.
OK, maybe one last question on a standalone basis. How should we think about sort of standalone Netflix sort of content spending over the next several years? Again, on a standalone basis, probably won't come into play. But your visibility in terms of margin expansion that you have right now?
Yeah. So maybe just the core engine of our business has been deliver more value, more entertainment value to our customers. And then we have got a business model which we feel is very effective for getting paid for that in terms of revenue and ultimately growing profit. So if you go back to the viewing hours, 8% in the United States. We're under 10% in every country that we serve. We believe there's ample opportunity to essentially continue to grow that value that we are delivering and grow the business as a result. We're at $18 billion in 2026 content spend. We anticipate we have opportunity to grow that in the future, $30 billion combined entities. We have the ability to grow that as well.
We have a model where that sort of content expense, we grow revenue higher than that content expense that allows us to expand margin. We believe we're going to continue to do that going forward. We're excited about that opportunity.
That's just the thing to reiterate, which is that we have been growing content spend and expanding margin as a standalone, and we've modeled to do that in the future as well.
Yeah, under any conditions.
Thinking of that. Yeah.
OK, that's great. Any wrap-up comments?
If you're wrapping up, I just would like to say something, obviously, to the folks in this room and the folks on the stream, many of whom have been owners of Netflix for the long haul while we've navigated some really complicated things. That is that we are going into a deal that we are really excited about. We think this deal with Warner Bros. is good for shareholders. We think it's good for consumers. We think it's good for creators. We think it's great for the entertainment industry as a whole because we're creating and protecting jobs in production. And we're going to continue to grow the business. And that's what we're really excited about. And we just wanted to say to all of you that we've appreciated you sticking with us through these things.
This is, in many ways, not as complicated as many of the things we've already done. We look forward to the next phase of this and getting this deal approved and moving forward. Very excited.
Looking forward to delivering all the value that we see in that deal for everyone's sake.
Fantastic. Greg, Ted, thanks for being here.
Thank you.