Netflix and Fortnite Compete for Screentime as Confirmed in Shareholder Letter

Netflix Sees Fortnite and YouTube as Some of Its Biggest Competitors

January 18, 2019

In its latest letter to shareholders, Netflix claims it “competes with (and lose[s] to) Fortnite more than HBO.” While both mediums clearly serve a different purpose, screentime is screentime. The attention Fortnite gets means there’s less to go around for Netflix.

The report estimated that Netflix consumes around 10% of television screentime in the United States and less than that on mobile. In other countries, that percentage is lower. All of these estimations are based on the fact that the company “serves on average about 100 million hours a day to television screens in the US and estimates that those screens are on [for] about a billion hours a day (120m hours x 2 TVs x 4 hours, plus hotels, bars, etc).

Netflix also competes with YouTube far more than Hulu, which is “small compared to YouTube for viewing time” and has almost no success in the Canadian market, while Netflix’s numbers are pretty much the same across the border. The report continues, pointing out that “when YouTube went down globally for a few minutes in October, [Netflix’s] viewing and signups spike for that time.”

Also mentioned in this report was the recent change in leadership with Spencer Neumann taking up the role of Chief Financial Officer at Netflix. We first suspected this change after Activision Blizzard stated Neumann would be terminated from his role as its CFO for “unknown reasons” that we now know involved him breaking his 18-month contract to take a job at Netflix.

As far as dealing with Fortnite and other competition the company plans to focus “not on Disney+, Amazon or others, but on how [it] can improve [the] experience” it provides Netflix members.

[Source: Netflix’s Letter to Shareholders]