A mid an ongoing controversy surrounding its latest Dave Chappelle special, including a walkout of employees today (Oct. 20), Netflix executives have laid out their Q3 results and discussed future plans during a conference call yesterday (Oct. 19). Here’s a few key takeaways for the Canadian screen industry:

Lessons for TV creators:

“Sometimes you think you’ve got lightning in a bottle and you’re wrong and sometimes you’ve got a great Korean show that turns out to be lighting in the bottle for the world… The one thing we can promise international creators is the possibility of having a Squid Game experience where the star of your show in Korea can go from 400,000 social media followers to 15 million in five days. It’s that kind of thing that happens on Netflix because we have this really great engaged fan base. And we have this UI that recognizes and helps them figure out how to find the show they’re gonna love, even if they never watch the show from Korea, I think it’s an amazing proof point of the delivery system.” – Ted Sarandos, co-CEO and CCO

Insight on development:

“We’ve been talking about how we go from being really a U.S. company that has international relation international operations to really a truly global company… We’re really excited about how do we leverage the DNA in the company around tech… Is there a better way to serve our creators and our creative partners? Give them a bigger palette, a bigger envelope to work from? And I think one of the exciting areas around this is that platform, we can do that. We can give that to everybody, all of our creative partners around the world. A sort of a bigger place to stand from and tell their story and that’s pretty exciting. – Greg Peters, chief product officer and COO

Future for filmmakers:

“We’re a few years behind in the film business… We started making meaningful budget for original film about three years ago and in that time, we’ve had five Oscar-nominated best pictures. And some big, big films in terms of viewing… That’s going to continue to grow and I don’t have any doubt that we’re gonna see that kind of excitement in the culture around our movies as we have on TV show over time…  People love to talk about their favourite TV show in a different way than they do movies. So I think maybe it’s just feels a little bit louder, but as you see in those numbers, we’re getting big viewing on our original films and we’re good. ” – Sarandos

Opportunities in gaming:

“We’re building all the systems around at the same things that’s made our service very powerful for recommending movies and TV shows… connecting great content creators into this audience. That’s the capability that we need to build on the game side as well now… I think we’re gonna take a bunch of different approaches to try and be successful in that space just like we did and movies and TV shows: from license to partner-produced to self-produced. There’s multiple avenues… including an internal game development capability. That internal capability really allows us to sort of push the edges on what is interactive storytelling and how do we bridge that more tightly with the linear storytelling that we’re doing on the video side? So, we want to build that up…  it’ll be a sort of a rich partnership over years to come.” – Peters

Foraying into CPG:

“I believe that consumer products is a really a great way to enhance the relationship with content fans… We have it in our wheelhouse to be able to do it and to grow it big. … The core for us is that it gets very, very big so that in enhances the talkability and zeitgeist moments around our content and gives fans a way to express that random in a way that amplifies it and attracts more fans.” – Sarandos

Are they coming for your company?

“As you can tell from our track record we are fairly selective when it comes to M&A. But… when an opportunity presents itself where we feel like we’re aligned with the company I think that’s an opportunity we’ll take. – Spencer Neumann, CFO

“Don’t expect us to go on a tearing buying spree or something like that. This will be one of the tools that we use and we’ll use it opportunistically, when we find a great great opportunity out there.”  – Peters

Netflix grew its revenue 16% year over year to US$7.5 billion, according to its latest financial report, due to a stronger slate of titles in the second half of the year.

The streaming service also added 4.38 million paid memberships, nearly double what the company recorded in Q3 of last year, which means Netflix ended this quarter with 214 million total paid memberships. Netflix is forecasting another leap heading into Q4, expecting 8.5 million new paid memberships.

The U.S. and Canada accounted for lowest subscriber growth numbers for the quarter, according to the company, while the Asia-Pacific region was the largest contributor to subscriber growth for the second quarter in a row.

Netflix’s Q3 report also signaled a shift in how it reports viewership. Later this year, the company will report on hours viewed for its titles instead of the number of accounts that have chosen to watch a series or film.

With files from Realscreen

Image: Unsplash