Further to my post last week, Variety reports that Netflix is raising one billion dollars to finance its new content.
“Netflix said it is raising $1 billion through a new debt offering, bringing its long-term debt load to more than $3 billion. The offering was upsized from an aggregate principal amount of $800 million originally announced Monday morning.”
It’s a good thing subscribers seem to prefer its original content. AllFlicks claims:
“Netflix user ratings show that Netflix’s subscriber base prefers Netflix’s original content to its syndicated content. Netflix originals sport an average rating of 3.85 stars out of five; all other content averages 3.47 stars. That means that user ratings for Netflix originals are 11% higher, on average, than user ratings for syndicated content. Netflix does best in the documentaries category, where users rate non-original content, on average, at 3.54. Netflix’s documentaries average 4.07 stars, a pretty impressive showing. Netflix’s TV shows do the worst, but still edge their other TV show content by 5.7%.”
Polygon reports that CEO Ted Sarandos says:
“The company wants to move to having about 50 percent of its catalog being original content… but according to recent reports, Netflix’s library has actually shrunk by 50 percent in the past four years.”
Gizmodo corroborates:
“Netflix’s content library isn’t just getting smaller, it’s also increasingly losing its best movies. The Streaming Observer did some analysis, and found that only 31 movies from the IMDb Top 250 are currently available on Netflix…. Even worse than the paltry selection of movies, it’s noteworthy that this figure is actually down 12 percent from 2014, when a Reddit user documented the 49 available films from the IMDb Top 250 then available on Netflix.”
My take: it seems somewhat disingenuous of Netflix to say its content is 50% original if it’s also reducing the number of films on the service. The analogy is crude, but it’s the difference between peeing in the kiddie pool and peeing in the big pool; the concentration of the same amount of pee is higher in the smaller pool.