Over the past week, analysts have been poring over Netflix’s audience growth and subscriber engagement numbers, which come as the platform announces moves to incorporate YouTube-originating programming into its library and other big swings.
Netflix has only a two-percent churn rate (referring to subscribers who cancel their subscriptions), which is pretty damn good for a streaming service. However, as more of the company’s business now involves advertising on its cheaper tiers, how much people are watching matters quite a bit. In a recent issue of Puck, Matt Belloni noted that “Significant ad growth is the narrative they want, and that’s basically impossible without engagement growth. If that engagement is not coming from the hits, they need more volume.”
Key to the conversation about engagement is the news that several Netflix series that recently returned for second seasons featured an extreme decrease in attention. In addition to the new seasons of Running Point and Avatar: The Last Airbender underperforming, as Lucas Shaw explained for Bloomberg, engagement is down across the board.
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Thus, new strategies are afoot. As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, “To bolster engagement, executives at the company have recently discussed adding live channels that would continuously stream certain programs, or shows and films from a certain genre,” as well as bundling other streaming services into Netflix subscriptions. These are both strategies currently in use by other platforms — for example, Peacock has numerous live channels, and bundling is a popular option within both the Prime Video and Disney streaming ecosystems.
Also, although getting into the business of year-round sports broadcasts isn’t of interest to Netflix execs, one-off events are, including potential bids on the rights for the upcoming 2030 and 2034 editions of the World Cup. Per the WSJ, “Live TV could be a shot in the arm for Netflix’s budding ad business, which has gained substantial momentum and generated about $1.5 billion last year. Earlier this year, the company said it expects to double ad revenue in 2026. With live programming, consumers can’t skip commercials.”
Then there’s Netflix licensing original content from publishers like Conde Nast and Buzzfeed Studios, which Puck’s Julia Alexander posited as “diversification. Netflix leans on pricey originals for engagement more than any rival, per Luminate, and its recent pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery was as much for library content as I.P. So call this a pivot to cheap filler, potentially freeing money for more international shows and sports.”
The 2025 Netflix Christmas Gameday Halftime Show featured Lainey Wilson, Andrea Bocelli, Snoop Dogg, Mateao Bocelli, EJAE, REI AMI and AUDREY NUNA. Photo by Julian Dakdouk/Netflix via AP Content Services
None of the above strategies, though, seem to include improving the perception of Netflix as a provider of quality television and films. Not that awards are the sole metric of this sort of thing, but looking at Netflix’s history with the Emmy Awards is informative: It took some time for the platform to build up solid credibility with TV Academy voters, but House of Cards was able to earn an Outstanding Drama Series nomination for its first season in 2013, and thanks to a solid stable of hits, the platform was at least represented at every ceremony since then.
However, one of the more seismic moments in Netflix corporate history was when Cindy Holland, the Netflix executive who oversaw the service’s early hits, was pushed out of her post as Vice President of Original Content in 2020 and was replaced by Bela Bajaria.
Bajaria got tapped to lead the TV department because of her proven success with building out Netflix’s international offerings. However, Holland was pickier with her programming choices, a situation exemplified earlier by Bajaria infamously green-lighting the truly awful comedy series Insatiable after Holland had already rejected it. As Kim Masters wrote for The Hollywood Reporter in 2022, a prominent Netflix supplier called that decision “‘the beginning of the Walmart-ization’ of the streamer.”
Netflix’s best year at the Emmys was in 2021 when The Crown won for Drama Series and Queen’s Gambit won for Limited Series. Both of those shows were shepherded to the screen by Holland. Since Holland’s departure, Netflix has managed to dominate the Limited Series category with the shows Beef, Baby Reindeer, and Adolescence, but has failed to break through elsewhere.
This year, Beef managed 16 nominations and The Beast in Me nine, though Netflix’s remaining Emmy plays — Black Rabbit, The Diplomat, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, and the final season of Stranger Things — all tied with seven nods. None of its nominees are frontrunners this year, not even in the Limited Series category; Beef or The Beast in Me could pull out a win, but HBO’s DTF St. Louis stands out as the stronger contender with its 13 nominations.
Netflix did come in second in terms of total nominations for this year’s Emmy Awards, largely thanks to its large spread of content. Coming in third was Apple TV. For those who have been staring into the streaming abyss since the early days of House of Cards, what Apple TV has been doing over the past few years feels strikingly familiar to those early days of Netflix — bringing in relatively big stars in front of and behind the camera for critically-acclaimed original series that generate real excitement. The platform may have even found its own Stranger Things in this year’s Widow’s Bay.
Apple and Netflix operate very differently, but Apple has the advantage on Netflix in terms of that illusive concept of “buzz,” which relies on quality more often than not. It’s understandable that the needs of the business today do require a push away from the more boutique strategy that defined the past. A big splashy hit for Netflix still feels like it could help the platform immeasurably.
Because in the meantime, that 2022 comment about “Walmart-ization” now feels like a prophecy: Too Much TV’s Rick Ellis just called Netflix “the Costco of the streaming industry”, and how that Costco-like strategy affects its programming:
“Take, for instance, the streaming standard of much more compressed season orders than you’ll typically see on linear television. It’s a topic that brings out strong emotions from Hollywood’s creatives, in large part because there is a formidable pay difference between a 23-episode season and one that runs 6-8 episodes. But you’ll also hear from writers that those longer seasons allowed shows to focus on more nuanced story arcs and secondary characters.
“But the reasons why Netflix produces shorter episode seasons is a combination of financial and strategic factors, and both components are driven by its subscriber-centric revenue model.”
There are still plenty of good shows on Netflix, and phenomena like KPop Demon Hunters can’t be overlooked — though that movie was a surprise hit for the platform, which acquired it from Sony Pictures Animation. Overall, if you measure a streaming service by its must-watch content in 2026, Netflix is rarely the first platform that comes to mind. As Shaw wrote for Bloomberg, “The amount of time customers spent watching Netflix last year grew less than 2%. That’s a big reason shares in the company have declined over the last year. Investors are worried that Netflix, while still the clear market leader, is losing its edge.”
Finding the next Heated Rivalry or Widow’s Bay won’t be an instant solution to those problems. But it would help Netflix shift from being a content warehouse to a repository of that most precious and rare resource: “must-see TV.”