Netflix is doing pretty well for itself at the moment, announcing record subscriber growth and decent financial results for the second quarter of this year as they continue to dominate the video streaming market.
In Q2 2015 Netflix gained a record 3.3 million subscribers, nearly double the 1.7 million subscribers the company added during the same quarter last year. Netflix now has 65 million subscribers in total, 42 million of whom reside in the United States.
The company's financial results were as expected: $1.65 billion in revenue for $26 million in net income. This equates to a 23% rise in revenue compared to the same period last year, and although profit dropped year-on-year, Netflix is currently more focused on gaining subscribers than making buckets of cash.
The good news led to a 10 percent rise in Netflix's share price during yesterday's after hours trading period. In 2015 alone, the company's share price has more than doubled, which is why Netflix also announced a seven-to-one stock split to bring the price back to around $100.
As for the future, Netflix is hoping they can carefully push customers to more expensive plans over the next few years. With the service's content library increasing each quarter, Netflix may need to explore increasing the price of plans or introducing a new pricing structure for premium content.
That's more of a long term proposition for Netflix though; for now, the company is planning on spending $1 billion on a big marketing push in 2016 to encourage new users to sign up. And of course, the production of Netflix Originals such as House of Cards and Daredevil will continue so that the service remains attractive to existing subscribers.