Sports fans? Netflix plans to increase spending

Netflix expects to spend in the neighborhood of $18 billion in cash on content in 2025 — and it sees plenty of runway to expand in the years ahead, according to Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann.

“We’re not anywhere near a ceiling” with respect to content spending, said Neumann, speaking Wednesday at the 2025 Morgan Stanley Tech, Media & Telecom Conference. As a global entertainment company, he said, “I think we are still just getting started.” The $18 billion cash content spending pegged for this year would be up around 11% from $16.2 billion in 2024.

Netflix is in about 40% of connected TV households around the world and has captured 6% of its addressable market, the CFO said. And, in the U.S. and other countries, Netflix still represents less than 10% of total TV viewing.

As for how big Netflix’s appetite is for live sports, Neumann said the company wants to remain in “those big, eventized moments,” like the pair of NFL games on Christmas Day and WWE wrestling, which started streaming in the U.S. weekly this year. “We loved the NFL on Christmas Day, Beyoncé Bowl, it worked,” he said. Whether Netflix would be interested in, say, acquiring an NFL Sunday afternoon games package, Neumann responded, “never say never on these things” but that it’s “not on our near horizon.”

For the fourth quarter of 2024, Netflix reported 18.9 million net new global subscribers, around double analyst expectations. For the full year, Netflix added more than 41 million subscribers, significantly up from 29.5 million in 2023.