For those who don't know me, my name's Eric Sheridan. I'm Goldman Sachs's U.S. Internet analyst, and it's my pleasure to have Greg Peters, Co-CEO of Netflix, on stage with me today. Greg, thanks so much for being part of the conference.
Super excited to be here!
So you've been in this co-CEO role now for right around eight months. Why don't you talk a little bit about the journey from where you were into this new role and what some of your key learnings have been so far in just the last couple of months?
Yeah, I mean, it's been relatively seamless and incremental, I would say, in part because my other co-CEO partner, Ted, I've worked with him for the entire time I've been at Netflix. And so, you know, we've been in all sorts of situations together. We know, you know, how we work and, you know, have a deep sort of respect for each other. And also, that, you know, Netflix had figured out the co-CEO model before me between Reed and Ted, so we sort of knew what the operational mechanism was and how it works. And I, you know, I think the... You said, what are the learnings or takeaways?
For me, I love the duality of the co-CEO model as it reflects how I see what we're trying to be as a business, which is really fusing together two, what are very often, different worlds. You know, a world of amazing storytelling and creativity and, you know, fandom, and how you access that, and a world of, you know, technology and product and how you be great at that. You know, our business works when those two work together the best, and I like the sort of structural representation in the co-CEO model then.
So that's an interesting point to make, and maybe we'll jump off from there. When you think about that duality in the business, creating content that people want to consume and then creating a product or a vehicle or a mechanism by which they consume it, how do you frame up internally what you see as the long-term opportunity that you're the most excited about in terms of capitalizing on the media landscape today and solving for that duality against that landscape?
Probably worth recognizing that it feels good to be in a leading position around streaming today when it comes to engagement or, you know, revenue or, or profit. You know, revenue and profit, we report, so you can take a look at the numbers. But if you think about engagement, just to, you know, give people a sense of where we are in terms of that, if you look at, in the United States, as reported by Nielsen, first 28 weeks, we were the top TV series in 27 of those 28 weeks, and the top movie in 24 of those 28 weeks. That's a really good position to be in and to really work to grow from.
But we think long term, there's just a huge, huge opportunity in front of us, and you can look at it a variety of different ways. One way to look at it is, you know, how many hours on the TV are we winning? And even in our most mature markets, we still win less than 10% of the hours on TV. And in the structural shift from linear to streaming, you know, even in the most, you know, advanced markets that are in that move, the majority of hours, like 60%, still happen even on linear today. So that's a lot of movement still to go, and we think a lot of opportunity for us to win hours.
Just one more view on that, I would say, is if you think about the total consumer spend in the areas that we serve, in the countries that we serve, so this is ex-China. Consumers spend about $620 billion in the areas that we play in, and we win about 5% of that consumer spend. So we feel like that's, again, a good representation of the upside, that we have in front of us.
Understood. When you think about the way the competitive landscape has changed, you know, if we go way, way back, you guys were transitioning from DVDs to streaming. Now you're the leader in streaming. There's competition for other forms of media in social media and short-form video and things like that, but there's also legacy media companies that have woken up to the potential for streaming. How do you guys think about the competitive landscape and how it evolves and fits back into your strategy? Or, as you guys have talked about before, do you just put the competition away and say: We're about execution as opposed to thinking about the competition?
Well, we do both. I mean, you sort of want to have a competitive lens in terms of do you have a sort of durable, competitive advantage-
Yep
... and are you building one? And I would say, you know, there's lots of competition out there in terms of multiple different forms of entertainment. I think we can talk about, you know, how do those structurally compete for each other. But in our, you know, our basic space, you know, which is, you know, film and TV series and now emerging into games, you know, we think about, you know, why do we have a durable competitive advantage? I think our competitors are realizing how hard it is to build an at-scale, successful, profitable, global streaming business.
Part of that's because it's capital-intensive, part of it because there are scale effects for sure, but also, I think the underappreciated component is, to do that, to be successful, you have to bring together a set of capabilities and competencies that really haven't had to exist in one company before. So you've got to be great at producing content across multiple different genres, multiple different languages, multiple different countries. You have to be connected into the creative community in all these countries around the world, have trust with creators, so they're gonna bring their best stories to you. You have to know how to speak to fans in all those different countries in the world and connect them with the content, enhance the quality and the value they're viewing because of that fandom. You have to think about product experiences and go-to-market that make that whole experience feel native.
How do you, you know, work with the right partners? How do you collect payments around the world? There's so much that has to... You know, you have to be good at. I think that really our competitors come from sort of two centers of being good at, like, one set of those things, but not the other or the, or the opposite. We're pretty good at all of those. We want to be better, certainly, and we're seeking to be better at all those, but I think that's an under-realized, you know, sort of durable competitive advantage.
Got it. When, when you think about the business in its current state, you know, it was a little over a year ago that you guys announced: We have all of this consumption that's unmonetized. We have these households that are watching our content, absorbing our service, but they're not paying us, and we're gonna put mechanisms in place over the next couple of years to sort of close some of the monetization-to-consumption gap.... Bring us into a little bit of how that decision went to market. You know, what, what was the tipping point to look at that and say, "We've got this consumption, we, we, we can drive more monetization," and how you thought about what the right product initiatives were to close that gap, looking out over a multi-year view?
Yeah, I mean, it was great to have so many people watching Netflix content, and we just wanted to basically make sure that when anyone was enjoying, you know, some show that we had and was getting value from the service, that they were actually also then paying us for it, because that was important to, you know, keep this virtuous cycle going, where we could take that revenue and turn it back into investment for more great stories for all of our members.
So ultimately, it's a pretty good example of just how we think about product development in general, which is a very sort of test and iterate kind of mode, where, you know, we have a theory about what will work for folks, but at the end of the day, we let our members tell us what works and what doesn't, by giving them an experience and then testing and measuring what sort of- you know, what is working and what's not. So we took this very iterative approach. You know, we launched an initial set of countries. We learned, you know, what we got right and what we got wrong from them, and a lot of this was about clarity. So, you know, really...
You know, I would say it was a situation where, let's say, you know, if you're borrowing Netflix, you're not thrilled about the idea that we're gonna charge you, right? So that's, you know, that's a fundamental sort of proposition. But if we can give you the information that you need to understand what we're asking from you, that it shows up in the right way, in a product experience that gives you the ability to action on it at that moment, these are all sort of, you know, classic, good product experience things. That was a much better experience, and that's sort of what we learned over time. We iterated on that. We improved the experience as we launched it in subsequent countries, and we tested and refined that, and you can see it sort of in the performance. You know, every subsequent phase was better.
I want to stick on that point.
Yep.
And obviously, there's two avenues we can go down here. We can talk about paid sharing, we can also talk about the ad-supported tier you're trying to build for the long term. But just sticking with the paid sharing in particular, first, you know, what were those key learnings? Was it all about messaging? Was it putting the right proposition in front of the right consumers? Some folks believe maybe you've slowed your approach and are taking a more deliberate approach than you did in some of the early markets. What were some of those key learnings, and how should we be thinking about this continuing to evolve in the next couple of years?
Yeah, I think we always had a deliberate approach. I mean, even as you think about sort of launching countries, you know, in phased approaches, where I think what I would characterize as a deliberate approach to make sure that we were learning and we were getting it right, as we, you know, launched in subsequent countries. There's a component of that which we're doing even within a country rollout, which we sort of take the highest confidence, most well-understood use cases and roll those out first, I would say, and then learn into those and develop more confidence in terms of our mappings of, you know, the household networks and also, you know, the product experiences that the consumers need. And you asked, you know, like, what did we find that folks needed?
Again, it's clarity of messaging was a, was a key component of it. I think there was a lot of, confusion when we first launched around, you know, what, what use cases were we, you know, trying to, prevent, essentially, and what use cases were we like, "No, you should... Traveling with Netflix is something that, you know, we want people to go do. You should go do that, and we're gonna make it easy for you to go do that." So a lot of it was around clarity, but then it's also just, again, what I call sort of bare-basic, good product experiences, which is that you want, you know, things to show up, in the right way, with the right communication, in a low-friction way, at the right moment. And so it's just...
You know, you have to typically iterate on that a couple times to get that super dialed in, and that's what we were doing.
Got it. Have you seen much change in terms of the broader consumer behavior on the platform? You know, we, we get asked all the time about, are people spinning down accounts because they now, you know, thought they were sharing with others? Are you seeing sharers come back in? What are some of the learnings of how the consumer behavior into your product at the household level has changed?
I think it gets to, you know, how people respond to this, gets to a little bit of why they were sharing in the, in the first, you know, moment anyway. Some folks were sharing because of what we call casual sharing, which is that they had borrowed, you know, their boyfriend's account, and, you know, the boyfriend didn't want to have a discussion around, like, "Stop using my account." And so they were just like, "Hey, it's easy. There's no reason for me not to keep using it," right?
Right.
And then some folks were sharing from a much more, I'd say, economic reason, right? Where it's just like they, you know, you know, in some places in Latin America, they were actually dividing up the account, and, you know, "I'd give you, you know, a couple dollars every month-
Right.
... You know, to factor that in." So part of it is, we had to come up with a set of solutions that solved for that range of needs, let's call it. And a lot of it was, you know, they call it casual sharers, where people just, you know, happened to have somebody else's account, or like, "Why should I, you know, get my own?" As soon as we said, "Nope, you have to stop using that account," they just got their own account, and that's what we call a spin-off account, and that's sort of another member just shows up as a, you know, a new member add. But then a lot of these other situations where we enabled what we call the extra member affordance-
Yeah
... Which is allowing an existing account holder to essentially buy, you know, a member slot for somebody else, those satisfy the different set of use cases, which you wanna share Netflix with, you know, a loved one or a family member, your kids going off to college, and you can give them the capacity to watch Netflix, and that solved for a different set of considerations.
In terms of how it feeds back into the broader initiatives inside the company around product, we've seen markets where you've launched the ad-supported tier. We've seen markets where some of the basic tiering has fallen away in relation to maybe an ad-supported tier being the new basic tier. What are some of the learnings about how the product and how the platform might continue to evolve based on what you've learned so far?
Maybe the broadest one is that, you know, we need to get increasingly sophisticated around what our plan structure is, to satisfy a wider range of, of needs over time. And think about that from a long-term, you know, both revenue optimization and member satisfaction perspective. But, you know, related to that is... We ultimately wanna have quite a wide spread of price and offerings.
Yeah.
where we are accessible to, you know, ultimately to the vast majority of the world's population at a price point that they can afford, that they feel is great entertainment value for what they're getting, at the right, you know, features. And then also be able to super serve fans who are willing to pay more for amazing entertainment content, and can give them an incredible, you know, fan experience that has the right set of features at a higher price point as well. So we're seeking to broaden that range, and to find that, you know, that right balance over time.
Okay. So keeping with this concept of product initiatives and platform evolution, there probably, if we had taken a poll in this room a couple of years ago, there were people who thought you'd never launch an ad-supported tier, and some people thought it was an inevitability. It was probably one of the great investment debates-
Yep
Around the stock over the last, of the company, over most of the last 5-10 years. So you decided to go forward with the ad-supported tier. Start to talk—Let's start this conversation with a little bit of like, what have been the key learnings so far as you rolled it out? And I know it's still very early days, and we'll talk a little bit about what you want to build for the long term, but what have been some of those key learnings so far?
Yeah, maybe to start with, it fits into this sort of fundamental proposition of widening that set of offerings, 'cause obviously, with ads, we can offer a low entry le-- a lower entry-level price, for more price-sensitive members. $6.99 in the U.S. is a, you know, it's a good, I think, an amazing, representation of entertainment value, very competitive, to all of our competitors in that regard. But then have the total, you know, revenue from any one of those members be enhanced by the advertising revenue that we get.
On, you know, learnings there, which will not be profound for anybody that's worked in the advertising side, but it's for us, you know, we sort of wanted to build a strong affirmation of our beliefs in this space, is that when it comes down to it, you know, our success in advertising is anchored to having amazing content that brands want to be next to, that they're excited about positioning their brands with. Having scale, so that we're relevant in terms of reach to advertisers, so they can get to the audience that they want to in an effective way through buying from us.
And then ultimately build, over time, a set of advertising products and features that make us, you know, not only competitive with linear, but then ultimately bring in some of the capabilities that digital advertising has into the kind of content, the sort of premium, you know, mostly what you might have seen on TV or pay TV before. And so that, you know, ultimately, by solving all of those things, we, you know, that's where we feel like we can have a very successful advertising business.
You know, I love the way you said, "Trying to," before, which is -
Yeah.
Very successfully building. Well, and, and, you know, as I go out and talk to advertisers myself, I get the sense that there's an enormous pent-up demand. You'll never have a supply problem of, of people who wanna put ad dollars behind your platform. But I think as you referenced, there's elements you have to put in place before those dollars come to you as a platform. You initially went with a partnership on some of the tech front with Microsoft, and now there's elements of maybe some of it has to be built, owned, and operated over time. How do you think about addressing targetability, metrics, you know, measurement and attribution, some of the things that advertisers want from you to build that type of scale, and that's just bringing dollars into the platform before we even talk about the subscriber side?
The subscriber side, meaning the scale side?
Well, I'm just curious first on, like, building the ad tool and the ad stack. Like, how should we be thinking about the pace, the cadence, how to think about watching that from the outside in of what you want to build to address what advertisers want from you guys?
Yeah, and just to be clear, we think about that as priority number 2. I mean, priority number 1 for us-
Yeah
is really scale when it comes down to it.
Yeah.
Because that's sort of, you know, the first order of business. But, you know, we are working with Microsoft, and we've got, you know, each of us, you know, combined total hundreds of engineers that are basically building in concert the set of features and products that will make that offering more attractive to advertisers. Examples of this, again, are things like Top 10. So giving an advertiser the ability to buy space on our Top 10 row, and that's something that I think, you know, is a unique or differentiated CTV kind of advertising offering versus what they could do on linear. But linear, they were predicting what shows were, we know, were popular and were buying against those, or maybe not.
We can actually say, "You can now buy a piece of essentially the entire Netflix popularity by buying that Top 10 row." That's an example of a product that we collaborated with Microsoft on. And then, you know, a lot of it's also quite, you know, brass-tacks stuff like measurement, verification, and this is a, you know, situation where, you know, we and Microsoft are doing work every day right now to basically build those capacities in all the ads markets that we're in and be able to offer those advertisers.
So in terms of building scale on the other side of the ad offering and building a scale of actual ad-supported subscribers or about subscribers, how should we think about whether you're agnostic to whether someone comes into the ad tier versus the full subscription tier, and what you might be trying to solve for in terms of your subscriber mix over the longer term?
I think we ultimately wanna engineer our way to a place where we are agnostic.
Okay.
Right? Where if you know, through a combination of pricing, price setting, plan, and feature set, where ultimately we're providing a range of options that, you know, the user can pick what's right for them, and we feel good about that. I don't want to be in the position where we're steering people, you know, you know, outside of that context into one place or another, because I think that ultimately won't serve, you know, the business well and will, you know, hurt us with users. So I think that gets to trying to figure out what is that plan offering? What is the relative pricing where you feel like they could land, you know, in all these different spots, and I feel good about the choice that they've made and the ultimate value to the business?
... So before we move past some of these product initiatives that have come out of the decision over a year ago on consumption versus monetization, maybe just put a finer point on it. In terms of if we were sitting here in a couple of years' time, what are you most interested in building on either the AVOD side or the product initiative, password side, pricing side, maybe, that comes back to what opens up market opportunity for Netflix longer term?
Password sharing, I mean, we'll be in the password-sharing business for some period of time. There's more work to go do, and, and quite frankly, I think we've built an elegant product solution that is a competitive differentiator, you know, that I think, frankly, a lot of folks are gonna be... It's gonna be tough for them to match that-
Yeah
... that sophistication. But I think of that as more of a transitional situation, right? Which is, we wanted to structurally set ourselves up, for better growth, by actually, you know, making sure that one-to-one association between getting value and paying us, was intact. Whereas advertising, I feel is a, you know, is a long-term, you know, business, where we wanna constantly get better at that, right? So again, part of that's building in scale, that's thinking about right price points, right plan offering, to make sure that we're naturally getting to that scale point. But then it's a lot of this, you know, product and feature work, right? And all the things that we've mentioned so far are, I think, the basics, right?
But we wanna obviously get beyond the basics and get to the kind of place where we're really unlocking what is, you know, the capability of connected TV to provide a differentiated experience for both users and for advertisers. I think that means, personalization when it comes to ads, increasing personalization when it comes to ads. When are we offering ads? What ad are we offering? That's a component of it, increasing relevance. And then also being able to think about, and more and more, how do we provide a differentiated ad experience where, you know, the ads start to feel like they're more part of the universe of the primary content that, someone is watching? So you can imagine us working with a showrunner on a series and thinking about a secondary brand-led narrative, that feels part of that universe.
I mean, and for me, the litmus test of success there is that our non-ads members would want to watch that content as well, and I think that would be an amazing place to get to.
Okay. So moving past some of the paid sharing and the AVOD initiatives into content spend, you know, your content spend today is very different and skewed than it was 10 years ago. You've gone into a lot of new and interesting areas of the broader media landscape. Talk a little bit about how that content spend has become more diversified, what some of the drivers have been, of elements of local language spend, documentaries, elements of full-length feature films, and how we should be still thinking about that being an evolving process of what the right mix of content spend is long term.
Yeah, very much evolving, but, you know, part of this is just having an understanding in every country that we operate in, you know, what is, you know, what does the opportunity look like for incremental investment? A lot of that comes from the metrics that we see from our own, content performance, and we obviously get a strong signal there. We're also looking at, you know, what does content performance, on other services or other, you know, linear look like, as a way to basically understand what are places where there's demand that we're not serving effectively, and how do we, you know, lean into that?
But I think it's increasingly what we're seeing is, the calculus behind that is getting more interesting and more complicated in ways that are very exciting to me, and I'll just give you one example of this. We just launched a show called One Piece recently, and this is a. It's a series that's based on a very famous manga by Eiichiro Oda, and, I mean, classic, classic, gigantic manga. Super, super hard to deliver in an English language, live-action format. We had our Japanese content team collaborating with our U.S. content team to put this thing together, and now we've launched it, and it's. I mean, this is a, this is a very high bar to meet, to basically take a storied manga and deliver it in English language, live action.
That's like pretty much all the haters are out, looking for, you know, a reason to hate you for it. And to be able to deliver it and have it be, like, you know, massively popular and a success around the world is amazing to see. So it's that kind of opportunity where we're unlocking, like, all these different components.
Yeah, it's always fascinating to me. I mean, I did one of these a couple years ago with Ted, and Dark had just come out.
Yeah.
You know, you're watching this supernatural show that's completely dubbed in English, came out of Germany. Nobody knew anybody in it. I was just watching, Who Is Erin Carter?
Yep.
Over the end of the summer break, which obviously is a local language piece of content that's going more global than not. So it's always interesting when you tap into these little interesting market dynamics.
Well, I think we'll see that more and more and more, right?
Yeah.
We're breaking down these barriers, and Dark is a really, really good example now, you know, several years ago. But, you know, I think it... You know, we, based on what we were seeing, it's almost certainly, you know, we've had millions of people watching the first German language, you know, drama-
Yeah
... that they were ever watching before in their, you know, in their lives. And so again, we could give, you know, 20 examples of this, and we'll probably have 20, you know, 40 more coming for the rest of the year, where we're breaking down those barriers and giving people access to creators and creative storytelling that they never would've seen before.
Got it. One, one thing I wanted to delve into is obviously you're bigger into feature, full-length films today than you were a number of years ago. How has the strategy around who to partner with and how to think about budget and scale of your operations around, feature films have evolved and changed over the last couple of years?
Yeah, maybe the starting point on that is just the general way that we think about these things, which is, you know, you start to engage in a new genre or so, and you put enough investment in it. We're, you know, we're playing to win in those things, so we're really trying to have enough activity for us to be in the ecosystem, you know, working with great creators and then learning by producing and having our members tell us what's sort of working or what's not, what we want to go do. And then, as we see success there and build confidence that we sort of have a picture of what's going, then we ramp that investment, and then we start to move to higher scale productions, right?
So you've seen us move to, you know, higher budget, you know, bigger films and films that basically are on par with, you know, the biggest sort of blockbusters that are out there. Part of it's expanding, you know, the number of places around the world that we're doing films, so we start to understand the same dynamics that we were talking about before. How do we work with different creators in different places? So it's sort of expanding on all those dimensions that you know we go after once we realize we know, we think we've got a crack at it.
... So I know in every one of these forums, you guys always get asked about sports programming over the long term, but just coming at it from a different angle, it always seems like you find these super interesting pockets of the sports world to build documentaries around. You know, I have a 16-year-old son that I would never have thought would've been a Formula 1 fan, but we watched a lot of Drive to Survive during the pandemic, and now he's a Formula 1 fan. How do you think about identifying some of the pockets where there's opportunity sets that may be less picked over in the sports landscape? When you think about Tour de France, Formula 1, some of the things- or even a unique approach to the NFL, like you did with,
Yeah
... with Quarterback. So how should we be thinking about the sports documentary landscape continue to evolve and educate where you might be gaining edge on some of those categories?
People are passionate about sports, and people are, you know, we can find passion about sports, even sports that they didn't know that they would love, and weren't even connected to. And ultimately, we think about it as just another form of amazing human storytelling, where we have all these, you know, people that are engaged in, like, tremendous feats of human performance, and there's drama associated, and we can find those. And so there's not, like, there's not a formulaic approach that we're looking for, so it's not like a Moneyball kind of model that we have around this sport versus that sport.
It's really finding, you know, just very similar to what we do in the other forms of content that we have, which is, like, where is a creator that has a vision, for a compelling story that they wanna bring to life, that we believe in, and that we can, you know, help them bring it out, and then find a really big audience globally for?
So, you know, I'm not asking specifically about the strike, but I know obviously there's a lot going on in the industry right now around content and content creation. But bring it back to a bigger picture question about how you continue to evolve, where you wanna allocate capital behind content, and where you see the pockets of maybe highest ROI in the industry. Is it still in the more traditional long-form, short-form content that comes out of the United States, or should we think more that this has continually evolved to a different mix of local language content and documentaries, and areas that could drive potentially interesting ROI angles to the business?
Yeah, you mentioned short form, and I would say, you know, we're more confident than ever that we should, you know, work within what I would, you know, characterize as this premium space, you know, which is more long-form content. We have no aspirations to sort of compete in, like, UGC or anything like that.
No.
So we're really focused on that, those same areas. And I would say, you know, we think that there's opportunity to, over time, increase our content spending and deliver more value to members around the world across all of those content categories, really. But it's, you know, one of the areas that's most exciting, again, is breaking down these barriers that have traditionally existed between storytellers, around the world, you know, whatever country that they live in, whatever language that they speak, and being able to now give them the ability to tell that story at, you know, a really high level, that, you know, previously was mostly accessible to, you know, a couple handfuls of creators, most of them in Hollywood. And then to give them the ability to connect that story with a huge global audience.
I would say, you know, we'll do more of pretty much everything you see us doing, but we're gonna do much more in that space as well.
And I know it'll probably feed back into the ad business to some degree, but one of the things that surprised me in the last couple of quarters, you continue to give these interesting stats about building audience size around pieces of content. You know, Wednesday would be a perfect example, where you're getting reach and social media connectivity that is the envy of some of the, you know, people on the content side. How do you think about continuing to build audience around individual pieces of content and creating new avenues of monetization around content because of that audience dynamic?
Yeah. I think, you know, we love it when you can feel the impact of one of the stories that we launch in culture and society, and that's really like, you know, a great heuristic of success. Wednesday is a good example of this. You know, and at the heart of it is you have to have an amazing story. You have to have, you know, a film or series that actually, you know, has that creative execution that people want to attach to. But then part of it is, you know, all the work that we do in the product world to make sure that we are finding that biggest audience, that we're, you know, we're showing up in a way that creates that point of accessibility.
And that's partly, you know, thinking about how do we make that content, you know, relevant to the user in the moment when they're, you know, sitting in front of the screen. Part of that is how does it show up in the language that they understand and can feel natural and native to? And then what we do is, you know, add a layer of what we call conversation or the marketing around it, which really magnifies that impact so that people can get a sense of that fandom and, right? And that just sort of feeds that cycle even more, and it goes forward. So, you know, we're constantly trying to go do that. You can't always predict when these, you know, happen, but, you know, I hope and believe we'll have many more Wednesdays to come.
Understood. If you go back to where we started the conversation, and I thought it was interesting, you framed it up as, you know, creating content and then aligning product and distribution around that content. Can you take that and apply it to how we should be thinking about your strategy in gaming? I think most of the investment community is still pretty confused as to what you're trying to build for the medium to long term. I talked to investors who think you're gonna be a mobile gaming company or eventually be a cloud-based gaming company or AAA games. What have you learned in gaming, and through that prism of content feeding back into product and distribution, how should we think about where we are and what gaming's become for Netflix?
Yeah. Ultimately, we wanna have incredible games that people love to play, and they can't wait to play, and they wanna be a Netflix member, or wanna retain their Netflix membership, or wanna pay more for the Netflix membership because we have great games.
Right.
We started with mobile because, you know, authoring for mobile and accessing a mobile, that's, you know, a well-understood path. That was an easy way to get started. We're excited about the performance, you know, that we've got in mobile. We're releasing more and more games, and we see it our... Every month, our engagement, you know, goes up in that regard. But we have aspirations to go beyond that. And so, you know, we have kicked off a while ago a cloud streaming initiative so that we could stream these games to multiple different devices and expand the reach, just like we have on, you know, on TV and film.
I would say, you know, it's a more technically challenging, you know, thing to do than to stream film and TV, so there's still more work to go do. And we've gotta prove ourselves that we can do it in an economically reasonable way, where the cost to render supports that, in a way that satisfies game players. That we're delivering them a game experience, you know, latency, all the other things that we need to go do. So I'd say, you know, it's a work in progress, and we don't, you know, we don't fundamentally know whether or not, you know, we can deliver that in 18 months or more like that's a couple years down the road.
But we know we're knocking away at it because someday we're gonna be, you know, everywhere with games and across all the devices we serve.
Maybe just last question as we wrap up. Thinking about your priorities for capital allocation in the business. You know, talking to you, the entire management team on a quarterly basis, I think we've been sort of, you know, indoctrinated that you're not really about big M&A. That's not really the way you're wired. You sort of build things. You don't necessarily buy them. But you have done some tuck-in acquisitions and looked at content libraries and things like that. How should we think about the priorities for capital inside the business that you think would line up with the highest amount of ROI or output in the business over the next 3-5 years?
Yeah. I mean, our top priority is to fuel the growth of the business by focusing on the core that we've been focusing on before. So a lot of that means incremental content spend. Part of that means investing in new initiatives like games or advertising. You know, a second-order component for this is, you know, when we very selectively find M&A opportunities that we think meet all of our criteria, and really, it's about the ability to grow faster because of that inorganic move rather than we can do organically, we'll do those. But I would say we've, you know, as you said, we've been very, very choosy about that-
Yeah
... 'cause we think that, you know, we can lose a lot of opportunity, you know, cost and management attention by, you know, doing a bunch of stuff that's very complicated versus just focusing on the core. And then the last part, you know, we return basically to investors. You know, that's the last bit.
Yeah.
But I would say just on that first point, just to note it, you mentioned capital allocation and such, and yeah, obviously, we're trying to think about where is that, you know, where is that place that we can deliver the most incremental value by investing in incremental dollar? We're looking at that. But first and foremost, the biggest thing is if we can just actually execute against the investments that we're making already, TV shows, film, games, that are 10% better, that is the highest leverage, most impactful thing we can do. It's what our users care about the most, and so we're putting the most amount of our, you know, energy and attention on making that better.
Okay. Well, please join me in thanking Greg and the whole Netflix team for being part of the conference this year.