After becoming a household name in the United
States, boasting nearly 40 million subscribers in its home country at the end
of 2014, Netflix has set its gaze abroad. The company is aggressively expanding
overseas, spending heavily to ensure it becomes the dominant Internet TV
service in every country that it enters. Already, Netflix has 18 million
international subscribers in 50 countries, it plans to operate in 200 countries
within the next couple of years, generating meaningful global profits starting
in 2017.
The downside of original content One of Netflix's
most important endeavor in the past has been creating original content. While
the vast majority is still licensed from the third parties, and often not
exclusive to Netflix's, the company is spending amount of funding in original
content for its subscribers.
The company has done some major successes so far.
Its content has won some major awards like 45 Emmy, 10 Golden Globe Awards. But
its original content is very expensive. Netflix spent $100 million to develop
the first two seasons of House of Cards, and that only got the company
exclusive streaming rights. While Netflix has been successful with its original
content so far, a string of expensive failures could prove disastrous for the
company.
Netflix's algorithms may allow it to have better
luck picking winners but the prospect of a $100 million dud, or a string of
them, should be a concern for investors.As explosion of competition Netflix
hasn't faced all that much direct competition over the years. But the Internet
TV revolution is still infancy, and competition is only going to intensify
going forward. Netflix's growth so far has been nothing short of extraordinary,
and its plan for worldwide domination is ambitious. But there is plenty that
can go wrong, and with the amount of debt the company is taking on to fund its
expansion it's essentially betting the farm on its long-term plan.





