Netflix’s UK sales have for the first time eclipsed a major broadcaster, with revenues topped £2bn last year against ITV’s broadcast and streaming division at £1.9bn, a shift revealed as television executives met in Edinburgh this week.
The milestone sits against continued global strength, global revenues of $12.6bn and quarterly net income of $3.4bn in the second quarter, and a share price that has nevertheless fallen 34pc over the past 12 months.
The strategic response is specific. Management has tightened password-sharing rules and pushed a cheaper, ad-supported tier, while moving some series to weekly releases rather than full-season drops.
Crucially, the company has made a play for live appointment viewing: it $5bn deal in 2024 to stream WWE’s flagship show, has aired high-profile boxing events and the Women’s World Cup, and this year struck a partnership with TF1 in June to carry live channels and catch-up programmes. Netflix has also expanded into podcasts, games and short-form videos to close engagement gaps with other platforms.
Those moves help explain why Netflix treats live programming as a growth lever even though it remains a small share of output: live TV is about around 5pc of Netflix’s total content spend and only 1pc of viewing hours, yet six out of 10 of its biggest new-member sign-up days in the last five years came from live events. At the same time, the company’s run of price rises, Western Europe saw the largest average price increases across services in the past three years, is showing signs of fatigue, and analysts at Enders warn Netflix is shifting to an “increasingly profitable but more predictable” phase.
“The growing question,” as Sky’s former chief operating officer Mike Darcey put it, “is whether Netflix can avoid a gentle slide into becoming increasingly like the cable bundle it sought to replace.” Netflix’s blend of ads, live events and weekly scheduling is intended to keep the service central to viewers’ routines; the risk is that the product starts to look functionally closer to the broadcast model it once disrupted.
The outlook to watch is whether Netflix pursues even larger live-bid prizes, it is said to be considering offers for the 2030 and 2034 men's World Cup, and whether those wins translate into durable subscriber or advertising growth rather than short-term sign-up spikes. For viewers, the consequence is practical: more appointment viewing and ads on a service built originally for on-demand, binge-first consumption.
