Though the competition to provide robust streaming services is heating up with the growth of Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime Instant Video, and the new Redbox Instant, Netflix is still holding its own. The company this week announced its fourth quarter financial results, and the news is overwhelmingly positive.
Netflix managed to add just over 2 million new subscribers to its Instant Watch streaming service, over 9 times the number it added in the fourth quarter of 2011. Internationally it added 1.8 million new streaming subscribers, bringing the total for 2012 to 10 million new streaming subscribers.
In a sign of the times, the number of new subscriptions for Netflix’s original DVD-by-mail service have been dropping steadily for the past year, and the company only added around 380,000 of those subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Given the huge deals Netflix has had to work out with content providers in recent years, it might seem nearly impossible for the company to turn a profit. It has managed though, to make a slim profit of $8 million on $945 million in total revenue.
Netflix wasn’t afraid to address its competition in its report. The company pointed to other streaming subscriptions as “a different service” due to the differing unique content between services. Netflix’s main concern with other streaming services is the content they share, as that could lead to other services being seen as a replacement for Netflix. To ease investors’ minds, Netflix pointed out that of its top 100 movies and top 100 TV shows, Amazon’s streaming service only has 73 of them, and Hulu has only 27.