Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos admitted the streamer’s growth isn’t moving fast enough for his liking. Speaking at Bloomberg’s 2026 Screentime event, he revealed that Netflix viewership grew just 2 percent over the first half of 2026, a pace that falls short of his expectations for the company.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos outlines why he wants faster growth from the streaming giant
“Overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster,” Sarandos said. The unexpected assessment comes as Netflix experiments with new formats to reignite engagement. Live programming, including high-profile NFL games, has come up as one potential lever.
Yet the numbers remain modest: Netflix devotes roughly 5 percent of its $20 billion annual content budget to live programming, which generates only about 1 percent of viewership. Sarandos conceded the return on investment isn’t “eye-popping.” However, he stressed that live events excel at driving “a lot of signups,” reducing subscriber churn, and pleasing advertisers. “The business is great and growing fine,” Sarandos added, softening his earlier tone.
A larger question hangs over Netflix’s ambitions: the looming $111 billion combination of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, which received judicial approval earlier on Wednesday. Asked whether he regrets Netflix’s brief winning bid for Warner Bros., Sarandos offered a blunt “Nahhh.”
“I think the plan was solid,” he said. “We won the deal at some point, so we think we priced it right — at our scale.” Sarandos remains uncertain about the merger’s competitive impact. “It looks on paper— so far it’s one and one,” he said of streaming-market share. “So I don’t know if one and one is two, or one and one is one and a half, or one and one is three.”
Despite recent deals with YouTube creators, Sarandos insisted Netflix isn’t pivoting toward user-generated content. “We’re definitely… not in the UGC business,” he quipped. “We’re in the professionally produced content business” (via The Hollywood Reporter).
