Netflix collapses and lays off its employees

Netflix is ​​not in its best shape. While the Reed Hastings platform records a consequent slowdown in its international growth, she now seems ready to make big sacrifices to save the furniture. Like Disney+, it has been planning for a few weeks to offer a new, cheaper subscription, partly funded by advertising.

This Tuesday, however, Netflix made a heavy decision: faced with the unexpected departure of 200,000 subscribers this first quarter of 2022, the king of SVOD announced the dismissal of 150 employeesmostly based in the United States. 2% of his personThat’s a lot, especially for a business that until then was thought to be booming. Even internally, the news seems to have trouble getting through. Asked by AFP, a spokesperson for the company said earlier this week: “These changes are primarily driven by business needs rather than individual performance, which makes them particularly challenging.”

Netflix cuts spending

If this layoff plan sounds like a bad surprise, Netflix is ​​facing increasingly tough competition. Gone are the days when the N rouge was the only platform to offer SVOD by subscription. The arrival of Prime Video, Disney + and Apple TV + has permanently weakened the American company, which must now be satisfied with an increasingly small piece of cake. The recent loss of subscribers — the first in more than a decade — marks a new stage in the streaming war.

Even if Netflix still counts 221.6 million subscribers, the firm knows that it will have to redouble its efforts to keep its place. This could in particular go through the enrichment of a catalog that has been at half mast in recent months, the deployment of its catalog of video games, but also the arrival of live events on the platform, which now intends to compete with Twitch and conventional television.