Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos acknowledged on Wednesday his streaming service’s slowed growth in engagement: Netflix viewership grew just 2 percent over the first half of 2026.
“Overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster,” Sarandos said at Bloomberg‘s 2026 Screentime event.
One potential kickstart to engagement is the service’s recent move into live programming, including a few high-profile NFL games. Netflix spends about 5 percent of its $20 billion annual content investment on live programming, Sarandos said, which in turn generates about 1 percent of viewership — not eye-popping ROI.
What live is especially good at, however, is generating “a lot of signups,” Sarandos said. It also helps to reduce subscriber churn. Plus, the advertisers really love it.
“The business is great and growing fine,” Sarandos said, cleaning up his previous statement.
But is it growing enough to keep up pace with a new threat to the marketplace, the looming $111 billion combination of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery? Asked if he regrets Netflix’s (very temporary) winning bid for Warner Bros. — and not the Discovery piece — Sarandos said, “Nahhh,” basically.
“I think the plan was solid,” he (actually) said. “We won the deal at some point, so we think we priced it right — at our scale. That was the top price point where I thought we could return value to our shareholders with that asset. Any more than that, I thought we’d be taking it into negative territory — even with our scale.”
Netflix had an agreement in place before David Ellison, who not long ago combined Paramount Global and Skydance, swooped in with a huge check backed by his billionaire father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison. The Paramount-WBD deal was finally given the go-ahead by a judge earlier today.
Sarandos says it remains to be seen how much of a threat the mega-merger will create. After all, the math may not math.
“It looks on paper— so far it’s one and one,” he said, speaking on the subject of streaming-market share. “So I don’t know if one and one is two, or one and one is one and a half, or one and one is three.”
There was a time when Netflix was racing to become Warner Bros.’ HBO before HBO became Netflix, as Sarandos famously said in 2012 as the streaming company’s chief content officer. Today, it appears Netflix has YouTube in its crosshairs in a similar manner — but Netflix’s recent deals with YouTube creators do not define a significant change in strategy, Sarandos said.
“We’re definitely… not in the UGC [user-generated content] business,” he told Bloomberg‘s Lucas Shaw. “We’re in the professionally produced content business. Now, I think there’s a bunch of people on platforms that are doing pretty close to professional programming already, and if we can better monetize that programming for them, then we can make a deal with them. But we’re definitely not trying to bring over the whole population of creators.”
Netflix can offer better monetization in part due to the fact that it has multiple revenue streams it can split whereas YouTube is almost entirely advertiser-funded.
Though it is playing more and more in YouTube’s creator pool, Sarandos said Netflix will not be offering a free tier — a completely ad-supported model — anytime soon. No version of FAST (free, ad-supported television) would be worth “cannibalizing the core product,” he explained.
