Netflix Lays off 1,000 Workers

Netflix, the leading platform in North America for streaming movies and television, has laid off 1,000 of its employees ahead of a quarterly earnings report expected next week. In a statement obtained by The Wall Street Journal, who first reported the news (though I spotted it over at Too Much TV), Netflix’s chief executives try to minimize any concerns for the company’s future.

“Our business is strong and growing, and we remain on track to deliver our full- year forecast,” Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters wrote in a memo. “We’ll continue to invest aggressively in high- impact areas to improve our service and further drive growth and innovation. Doing that means making focused choices across the business so we can keep delivering for our members, partners, employees, and investors.”

Those “focused choices” include not just layoffs but price hikes, with the company now asking around $30 per month for an ad-free plan.

Netflix is one of the only players in the streaming media space who regularly turn a profit — but getting to that point took years, and at the time, Netflix had the benefit of being the only significant player in the space. Now that the media landscape is littered with $15-a-month streamers, basically all of them struggle to find a way to turn a profit.

Recently, Disney+ updated its terms of service to give themselves more leeway to play ads, even on account tiers that were previously ad-free. They say it will primarily impact sports and other live events, but when something similar happened with Prime Video a couple of years back, it wasn’t long before ads were essentially everywhere.