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Netflix Plans To Double Its Number Of Original Series Next Year, Adding 20 Unscripted Shows

By Darien Cavanaugh
Published on: 00:23 PST, Dec 6, 2016

Netflix plans to double the number of original series it produces next year, adding 20 new unscripted series as well as several scripted series, according to a report by Variety’s Todd Spangler.

The streaming media company currently has 30 original series in “various stages of development or release,” Spangler writes.

Netflix intends to focus on unscripted reality shows with the potential to “travel” to international markets.

Spangler gives Ultimate Beastmaster, a physical competition reality show produced by Sylvester Stallone and Dave Broome, as an example of a show that will travel well. Ultimate Beastmaster is already slated for production in six different countries — the U.S., Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Germany, and Japan — with different athletes or celebrities hosting the show in each country.

“When Beastmaster hits in Korea, they’ll never have seen anything like it,” Netflix’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, said.

Speaking at the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference in New York on Monday, Sarandos said that Netflix will produce up to 1,000 hours of new original programing in 2017, adding “that’s a conservative measure right now,” according to Spangler. One thousand hours of new original programming would roughly double what Netflix offered in 2016.

To allow for the production costs of the new programming, Netflix will increase its budget for new programming from $5 billion for 2016 to $6 billion for 2017 on “a profit-and-loss basis,” Spangler notes.

TechCrunch reported in September that Netflix aims to make 50 percent of its video library original content.

“The 50-50 target was revealed by Netflix CFO David Wells at the Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia conference on Tuesday (via Variety), and Wells added that they’d like to hit that mix sometime over the course of the next few years,” TechCrunch reported. “As for its progress so far, Wells said Netflix is already about ‘one-third to halfway’ to that ratio, having launched 2015 hours of original programming in 2015, and with the intend of achieving a further 600 hours by the end of 2016.”

Producing original content has long-term benefits for Netflix in terms of licensing and profitability, TechCrunch explained. While the upfront costs of producing your own content can be greater, it is a “one-and-done” deal, giving the producer the rights to the work in perpetuity without having to renew licensing agreements or pay out more money in licensing fees down the road.

And Netflix has seen extraordinary success with much of its original content, particularly the Stranger Things series and the Luke Cage and Jessica Jones series from the Marvel universe.

Netflix will also focus on expanding its library of original movies.

“According to Sarandos, the comedies from Adam Sandler it has released so far (The Ridiculous 6 and The Do-Over) have been the No. 1 performing titles everywhere in the world,” Spangler writes. “He also pointed to Bright, a cops-and-orcs action film starring Will Smith and Joel Edgerton and directed by David Ayer (Suicide Squad), as a potential franchise.”

“That’s the kind of project we’re trying to steer the model toward — the way we’ve created television events, can we do that in the movie space?” Sarandos said.

While Netflix is working on providing more and better programming, the company is also striving to improve the overall user experience of its members.

Engadget reported Monday that Netflix has “updated its video coding to make downloads look better.”

The update focused on improving the way movies are downloaded to smartphones from Netflix. The goal was to provide better visual quality while reducing the amount of data used by the phone.

One area that Netflix still is not looking to expand into is live sporting events. Sarandos says that Netflix simply isn’t a very good platform for live programming.

Doubling the amount of original content seems like a fair trade off.

[Featured Image by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images]

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