Netflix grew revenue year over year by 3.7% to $8.162 billion in the first quarter, missing guidance of $8.242 billion. Netflix also added just 1.75 million customers overall during a quarter in which it has stopped issuing customer expansion guidance.
Also read: The Disc Is Dead? Netflix to End DVD Rentals
Of course, Netflix has come a long way since its fateful Q1 2022 earnings report, during which it shocked the world with a first-ever quarterly customer loss of 200,000 souls.
But Tuesday's earnings didn't generate the kind of strong, resurgent message Netflix made during its Q4 2022 report in February, when it report major customer expansion of 7.66 million globally.
Still, Netflix has a great streaming business -- don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
The company reported free cash flow during the January-March period of $2.117 billion. Net income came in at $1.305 billion.
Declaring its intention to "improve monetization" globally, Netflix said in its quarterly letter to shareholders that its pleased with its decision in the first quarter to reduce pricing in 116 countries.
"While they represented less than 5% of our fiscal year 2022 revenue, we believe that increasing adoption in these markets will help to maximize our revenue longer term," Netflix said.
The company also said that its happy with the results of its partially ad-supported $6.99-a-month tier, which was introduced back in early November.
To increase uptick of the tier, Netflix will increase the number of available concurrent streams from one to two. It will also bump the resolution from 720p to true 1080p HD.
Also notable: Netflix will kick off its long-awaited new account-sharing policies in the U.S. in the second quarter.
"We’re pleased with the most recent launches of paid sharing, and while we could have launched broadly in Q1, we found opportunities to improve the experience for members," Netflix said. "We learn more with each rollout and we’ve incorporated the latest learnings, which we think will lead to even better results. To implement these changes, we shifted out the timing of the broad launch from late Q1 to Q2. While this means that some of the expected membership growth and revenue benefit will fall in Q3 rather than Q2, we believe this will result in a better outcome for both our members and our business (more details in the monetization and revenue section)."
