Netflix plans to spend $8 billion on new content in 2018

Netflix plans to boost its number of original titles by 700 this year, with a total spend of $8 billion (around £5.8bn / AU$10.3bn) on all content across the service. That’s two-thirds the GDP of North Korea.

These plans were detailed by Netflix CFO David Wells at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco.

It represents a healthy jump of $2 billion (around £1.5bn / AU$2.5bn) over the amount it spent on programming in 2017.

Originals worth watching

Netflix streaming exclusives we’ve already seen in 2018 include Duncan Jones’s interesting but critically panned Mute and sci-fi TV series Altered Carbon.

Other oddities to look forward to in 2018 include a TV reboot of sci-fi classic Lost in Space and the The Ballad of Buster Scruggs mini-series, directed by the Coen brothers.  

As of January 2018, Netflix had 117.6 million subscribers worldwide. Amazon’s rival Prime video lags behind, despite having an estimated 90+ million Prime subscribers in the US alone. IHS Markit estimates there were 44 million active Prime Video users in 2017.

Fancy returning to Netflix or, finally, giving it a try? A standard subscription costs $10.99 (£7.99, $AU13.99) a month, while the premium sub with 4K video and four concurrent streams costs $13.99 (£9.99, $AU17.99).

Update: This story was corrected to reflect that Netflix is adding 700 new original titles in 2018, but the $8bn is total spend across the catalogue, not just the Netflix originals.

Via Variety

Andrew Williams

Andrew is a freelance journalist and has been writing and editing for some of the UK's top tech and lifestyle publications including TrustedReviews, Stuff, T3, TechRadar, Lifehacker and others.