Netflix - Earnings Call - Q3 2011

Transcript

Speaker 1

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Netflix third quarter 2011 earnings Q&A session. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Ms. Ellie Mertz, Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon. Welcome to the Netflix third quarter 2011 earnings Q&A session. I am joined here by Reed Hastings, CEO, and David Wells, CFO. We announced our financial results for the third quarter at approximately 5:00 P.M. Pacific Time today. The shareholder letter, the Q3 financial results, and the webcast of this Q&A session are all available at the company's Investor Relations website at ir.netflix.com. As is our standard practice, we will begin the call with questions received via email. Please email your questions to [email protected]. In the time remaining after email Q&A, we will also open up the line to take live follow-up questions. The dial-in number is within our investor letter, but let me repeat it now. Please call 760-666-3613 if you would like to get in the call queue. We may make forward-looking statements during this call regarding the company's future performance.

Actual results may differ materially from these statements due to risks and uncertainties related to the business. A detailed discussion of such risks and uncertainties is contained in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the Commission on February 18, 2011. A rebroadcast of this Q&A session will be available at the Netflix website after 6:00 P.M. Pacific Time today. Now, let's move directly to questions. Similar to previous quarters, we have organized the questions by topic as we received them via email this afternoon. We'll start with questions about the domestic business. Given the sub-losses in October, why are you so confident that November will be flat and December will have positive net adds for streaming? What does the trend look like week to week in October?

Speaker 0

What we've seen is a second wave of cancellations from the price increase. The first wave was in July upon announcement, and the second wave has been in September and October as people become more aware of the price increase and then either change the plan or cancel. That wave has been declining very steadily over the past couple of weeks, and we have substantially less weekly cancels now than we did just three or four weeks ago. That's what gives us confidence that it's this wave passing through.

Speaker 1

Why do you specifically believe your December month domestic net adds will be strongly positive? Do you plan a major marketing campaign to help make this happen?

Speaker 0

Our marketing has been very successful for the last several years, and we don't plan on any substantial change to it. It's a great set of campaigns that work very well at attracting streaming subscribers. In Q4, particularly in December, there's more focus on a set of devices, video game consoles that get sold, iPads that get sold, a wide range of devices. Our expectations are modeled from prior year's performance.

Speaker 1

Why not reintroduce a combined streaming/DVD-by-mail plan offering at a discount for taking both?

Speaker 0

As we addressed in the letter, we think the future is brightest by focusing on streaming. We could, in principle, offer a discount for hybrid, but if we were going to use discounting dollars, we wouldn't want to be trying to incent more DVD use and subsidizing DVD. We'd want to be discounting streaming and focus on getting even more market share. As it turns out, we think that $7.99 streaming is such a great price that mostly we should focus on continuing to fill out the content. We are really quite comfortable in our growth with the two $7.99 programs.

Speaker 1

Do you need to ramp spending to win back sentiment to drive the virtuous cycle, even if it means lower margins for the next 12 to 18 months? Has your programming spend targets for 2012 changed due to the change in subscriber trends? If so, what type of content are you giving up?

Speaker 0

As we said in the letter, the focus for us is in building back our reputation and brand strength, but that's not through grand gestures, signing some crazy content deal, or doing something else. It's the same set of steps that we've been using year after year for the past 10 years in terms of building our brand, which is a steady focus on execution, improving our service quarter after quarter. In terms of our programming content, we do have built into our plan substantial increases in the content investment over this year and over the prior year. It's really exciting that we're able to fill out that content as we document it in its effect in our letter.

Speaker 1

Can you please provide apples-to-apples comparisons for your subscriber guidance? What does it imply on a unique subscriber basis, and how many hybrid subscribers are you assuming for Q4?

Speaker 0

This is David Wells, the CFO. In terms of our subscriber guidance, what we said in the letter was we would be up slightly from the 23.8 million unique subscribers we ended Q3 with. That tells you sort of where we are from a unique subscriber basis. I will say that from a hybrid subscriber basis, we expect streaming-only subscribers to grow substantially, DVD-only subscribers to be up somewhat, and for those subscribers taking both services to be down. I think all the pieces are there in the letter and the guidance.

Speaker 1

Will churn peak in Q4?

Speaker 0

We focus on net adds and growing the business. We make it very easy for customers to exit or cancel Netflix and then come back. We really do not focus on churn. We focus on total growth of the business or net additions. I think if they were meaning to ask the question of will the number of people leaving the service related to the price changes peak in Q4, Reed's already answered that question in terms of the weekly trends that we see and the retention rates.

Speaker 1

Could you provide more detail around your domestic streaming contribution margin? 8% seems unusually low given that you already have 21 million streaming subscribers and should therefore have significant scale. Is there a subscriber level at which you believe your streaming contribution margin will meet or exceed your DVD contribution margin?

Speaker 0

I think in the long run, the long-term margin structure for streaming will be ultimately determined by the competitive space and how many competitors we have. In the short run, we've been aggressively adding streaming content at the same rate of subscriber growth, and we continue to anticipate investing in that in 2012. We do have the confidence that we'll be able to grow in pace along with that rate of investment addition. We think we'll be able to take up contribution margin at the same time.

Speaker 1

Related question, how will U.S. content costs double in 2012 and contribution margin be up 100 bps every quarter?

Speaker 0

I think I just answered that question, but we would anticipate that the growth of the streaming subscribers to outpace the content addition. The other part is that in Q4 of this year, we've taken the content costs way up. It's not doubling the Q4 levels going forward. It's on a year-over-year basis.

Speaker 1

What is the impact of the overall badge publicity on your cost per addition in each of the streaming and DVD-by-mail categories? Is the adverse impact more so on the streaming side or the DVD-by-mail segment? I can take this one. As you saw in our investor letter, Q3 SAC of about $15.25 was actually comparable to the prior quarter. In Q2, we reported a very similar SAC of $15.09, and it was actually down this quarter about 24% from a year ago. To date, we haven't seen any of the negative publicity affect our subscriber acquisition costs.

Speaker 0

I think what we would imply is that our SAC might be even lower had we not had a brand hit.

Speaker 1

Moving on to questions specifically about the DVD business. I understand the ripping the Band-Aid off approach you use with your pricing changes, but what possible rationale could one use to justify the idea of paying to develop and build an entirely separate brand like Quickster?

Speaker 0

In hindsight, it is hard to justify. I will tell you that the brand properties of DVD and streaming are quite different. DVD is complete, but it's got the by-mail aspect, which is quite slow. Streaming is instant, and the selection is less. Having separate brands representing really the different audiences that care about those two services can, in theory, make sense. However, in practice, post the price increase, Quickster became the symbol of Netflix not listening. We quickly changed course on that, and we're going to stick with DVD as part of the Netflix brand. Going forward, we'll be very aggressive on promoting streaming, Netflix, and the benefits. Anyone who wants to also subscribe to DVD will be very welcome. We're going to be pushing and promoting streaming.

Speaker 1

What are your assumptions for growth for the domestic DVD business? Are the DVD trends company-specific, or is there a larger industry trend or change in consumer behavior? I noticed that DVD margins are currently much higher than streaming. What are your long-term contribution margin targets for U.S. streaming, international streaming, and DVD?

Speaker 0

I think David answered part of that about the long-term margin. DVD is partially high margin because of the U.S. per sale doctrine, where we can buy the DVD, pay for it once, and then rent it as long as we want. It is an unusual situation limited to DVD. In terms of DVD subscriber counts and base, this quarter, there's a big down draft as evidenced in our guidance. It will be a slow decline over the next many years for DVD. As we said in the letter, we don't anticipate further investments in equipment and property, plant, and equipment for DVD. We think that we can manage that downward.

Speaker 1

This is a similar related question. Given that DVD-by-mail is a mature, some would call it buggy-whip business category for renting recent films, do you anticipate a steady decline in that business, or do you believe there is a stabilized level of subscribers that the business is likely to support? In other words, what is the minimum subscriber level required to sustain a reasonably profitable cash cow business in that segment, and how viable do you believe it is?

Speaker 0

It'll probably be something like AOL dial-up from 2002 to today, where it's a steady decline every year of a little bit, but there's a long-term residual market. There's very little fixed cost in the business. That's not a material cutoff of its efficiency. It's almost all variable cost: the postage, the labor, all of those aspects.

Speaker 1

Final question on the DVD business. Historically, Netflix's DVD business was so successful because it could effectively monetize the back catalog, a rental mix of only 30% new release and 70% back catalog compared to Blockbuster at effectively 90% new release and 10% back catalog. How has the streaming service affected this mix for hybrid customers, and how much impact on profitability is there as DVD rentals shift towards new releases?

Speaker 0

has been no substantial shift in the DVD mix over the last couple of years. DVD is still primarily a catalog rental business where people like the incredible depth and breadth of the catalog, over 100,000 titles. I would also add to that that we've said before that Netflix is not the only service that our subscribers use to source their entertainment. To the extent that subscribers also use their local video store, Redbox, and other services, they continue to do that.

Speaker 1

Let's move to questions about content. Has exclusive content become more important? What is your bias in terms of paying either higher fees for pure exclusivity or paying lower rights fees and letting something like Epix become non-exclusive?

Speaker 0

As we mentioned back, I think, in our April investor letter, the industry is mostly an exclusive licensing industry and will end up doing more and more exclusive over time. That has been witnessed in what we've seen to date. We do expect to continue to expand exclusive licensing arrangements. On Epix specifically, I don't have a comment.

Speaker 1

Is original content the key to re-energizing gross additions?

Speaker 0

Gross additions are up over a year ago. Of course, we always want them to be up even more. Original content may play a part in that over time. We've got some smaller innovative original content with Lillehammer and some larger, you know, high-profile content next fall. Those are nice augmentations to the strategy. The core of our strategy is to create a great customer experience on the content we have using the personalization, the on-demand incredible streaming that we have. That's what's really propelled our growth over the last several years.

Speaker 1

Okay. Specific question about Epix. The folks at Epix state that there is a window starting August 10, 2012, allowing Epix the option of either renegotiating new terms on your current deal or leaving the terms as is. Therefore, can you confirm that this is indeed the case?

Speaker 0

We don't talk about specifics on the deals that we had. I will say that that date sounds early.

Speaker 1

To what extent are your streaming content deals, which usually encompass multiple years on variable cost terms, i.e., tied to subscriber numbers, to better assure maintenance of your operating margin targets? I can take this one. Substantially all of our streaming content licenses are on a fixed-fee basis, and we amortize them straight line over the length of the license agreements. Next question. Do your content deals include broad change of control limitations, which would cancel the agreements if you were ever acquired?

Speaker 0

Again, we don't usually talk about specifics, but no, there isn't a limitation.

Speaker 1

Are you okay being rerun television?

Speaker 0

I think, as I said, over the last couple of months, it's not how I would characterize it, but it's not fundamentally inaccurate to say that we have incredible complete prior season, like the last couple of seasons of "Mad Men," "Breaking Bad," etc., and that that creates a great customer experience, especially for episodic content and going back on series that you might not have seen all the episodes or didn't get into. Complete prior season plus a huge selection of movies is a great combination service.

Speaker 1

In advance of the release of the full 10-Q, do you have an updated figure for total off-balance sheet streaming content commitments?

Speaker 0

Sure. Streaming content commitments in the table will read $3.5 billion, up from $2.3 billion. That number is inclusive of what's already in the library. Essentially, we're writing up another $1.1 billion in future commitments that don't meet the criteria for library recognition.

Speaker 1

What's the split between movie streaming and TV streaming in the U.S. market? Does that differ in Canada?

Speaker 0

TV, as a percentage of hours, is ahead of movies at this point in most places in the world for us. It can vary sometimes on the programming mix. Round numbers, think of them as they're each about half.

Speaker 1

When you say that you will be spending nearly double what you spend for the content this year in 2012, will that be all new cash outlay, or will that include the multi-year contracts you have already entered into and currently hold either on or off the balance sheet?

Speaker 0

It will include the deals that we've already announced and included, and some new deals. It's a mixture of both. It does include the new deals, I mean, the existing deals. The increase referred to there is P&L view. Sure.

Speaker 1

Moving to some questions about competition. What is your competitive advantage competing against the traditional pay channels? What about against all the presumed new entrants that everyone seems to be so spooked about, such as Amazon, Hulu, Dish Network, Google, and Apple?

Speaker 0

Relative to pay television, it's not a zero-sum game. Many people, including me, subscribe to HBO because it's got incredible content in addition to Netflix. Think of it as there's multiple channels and people will consume from multiple providers. That being said, when budgets are tight, there's a hierarchy of which one you use most. We definitely want to win those. Our competitive differentiation there is that we're a pure on-demand experience, which means you can create a much better user experience by being pure on-demand. We're highly personalized, so it's much easier to discover lots of content you might not know exists. It's unique for each individual. Of course, a more enormously great value at $7.99 unlimited and unbundled from the traditional cable system creates an incredible value. Those are the primary three. In terms of the many new competitors, that's exactly what happens in a big new opportunity.

I think everybody sees that internet video is going to be an enormous market over the next couple of years. It's completely predictable that there will be many new entrants. We're focused on how do we extend our lead and our benefits, again, focused on streaming.

Speaker 1

What, if any, impact have you seen from Dish Network's effort to build out its Blockbuster movie pass streaming option? Same question for Amazon Prime free video offering.

Speaker 0

From neither one have we seen any impact.

Speaker 1

Moving to questions about international. How long will the international expansion be halted?

Speaker 0

We are going to put a pause on our international expansion post the UK and Ireland until we get back to global profitability. That depends on how fast we can grow our global subscriber base, which will be, you know, some number of quarters. We are eager to get back to continuing the international expansion because we see it as such a large opportunity, but we need to take a few quarters to get our subscriber base back to the appropriate size.

Speaker 1

Why did you choose the UK and Ireland as your next market, even though it's expensive on a relative basis and already fairly competitive? Hasn't Sky locked up most of the content rights already? What is your point of differentiation there?

Speaker 0

Sky Movies does have the six major studios, but there's a wide range of other movie content available from the non-six majors. There's a tremendous amount of television that's available also. Sky Movies is expensive. It's $16 or about $25 a month, and it's only taken now by less than 5 million citizens or households. There's a big opportunity for those who don't have Sky Movies. For those who do have Sky Movies, we're using our TV content selection to attract those subscribers. To answer the question of why the UK and Ireland, it's because we see a very attractive market with great over-the-top penetration. Many consumers are very comfortable with online video and use it frequently from Four on Demand, from BBC iPlayer, Sky Go, all of the different providers. It's a very fertile market in that way.

Our big advantage is really knowing the streaming technology well, the streaming marketing, and we feel great about entering with all of our CE partners.

Speaker 1

On international, you're now investing in multiple markets when your core domestic market is experiencing growing pains. With UK and Ireland, you're entering into a market where Love Film was the first mover. Can you discuss how you think about the trade-off between establishing a foothold in international markets while attempting to grow domestically through broadening the content library?

Speaker 0

In the U.S., we're very confident of our success in streaming. Our content is in the best shape it's ever been. It's really an incredible selection of content, and that's showing up for us in viewing hours and all the kind of key metrics. In Canada, we're very successful, so we're excited about that. Now we're going to be focusing on the UK. Love Film, which is owned by Amazon, is a well-run firm. They'll be a great competitor. They'll be one of, you know, a dozen competitors for over-the-top, including, as I mentioned, the BBC iPlayer, Four on Demand, Sky Go, and others. We look forward to entering the market and establishing what a great value Netflix is. I would also add that Love Film was the first mover in DVD-by-mail in the UK. It's not clear to me that they're the first mover in streaming.

They do have some offering there, and they're increasing that offering. If we launch in Q1, it's not clear they're the first mover in streaming.

Speaker 1

Will you quantify the magnitude of consolidated losses that you are likely to incur in the first part of 2012 as you launch in the UK and Ireland?

Speaker 0

In Q4, we guided to contribution profit midpoint of $65 million loss. If you put that together with our statements that Canada is roughly break-even, you can assume that most of that is Latin American loss plus some expenses related to prepping for the UK. I would say that the first quarter loss for the UK is in rough numbers akin to the Latin American loss.

Speaker 1

Inputted in your guidance, are you saying that Netflix will be unprofitable on a global basis over all of 2012? In other words, will losses over the next few quarters be larger than any profits that could come in in 3Q or 4Q of 2012?

Speaker 0

What we said is that in the first few quarters, we're putting a pause on international until we get back to global profitability. We haven't guided to the later half of 2012.

Speaker 1

Are there any differences in terms of the types of content that are working in Latin America versus the U.S. and Canada? What types of shows and films are proving the most popular there?

Speaker 0

You know, we're very early in on Latin America, about 45 days since we launched. We're just starting to learn those lessons and to figure out how to constantly improve our service as we did when we launched Canada and in the six months after we started Canada. We'll learn more every quarter on that. An easy anecdote on that one is telenovelas work well in Latin America, and they don't work in Canada. I don't think that's telling you anything other than what Reed said.

Speaker 1

Can you provide any more detail on your Latin American rollout? Which specific countries in Latin America have been the biggest contributors to your international subscriber growth?

Speaker 0

As you would expect, Mexico and Brazil are the two largest broadband streaming markets, and those are our two largest markets.

Speaker 1

Moving on to a question about CE devices. In January at the CES conference, you announced that Best Buy, Memorex, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, and others would add Netflix buttons to the remote controls for their devices. Can you give us an update on these partnerships? Will these devices be shipping in time for the 2011 winter holiday season?

Speaker 0

I don't know specifically on specific brands, but as a whole, I would say the Netflix button program has been going great, and there'll be lots of devices in the market in Q4 in preparation for Christmas.

Speaker 1

Okay. Some other miscellaneous questions. What is the company's guidance for its future tax rate? I can take this one. We would guide to roughly 30% effective tax rate for the full year and probably slightly higher, something around 38% for Q4, likely trending to, say, 39% in the following year. If you look at the Q3 effective tax rate, it was quite low at approximately 33%, and that was due to the expiration of some statutory limitations on some past audits. We had a discrete benefit in Q3 that we won't have in future quarters.

Speaker 0

Just a clarification, Ellie, you said 37% for the full year, correct?

Speaker 1

Yes.

Speaker 0

Okay.

Speaker 1

How long will you wait for regulatory clarity in the U.S. related to the Facebook issue?

Speaker 0

There is a bill in Congress now, H.R. 2471, which clarifies that a consumer does have the right to get permission for their video data to be shared. Predicting what the U.S. Congress is going to do is not something we're going to engage in. If it passes, that's great and fantastic for consumers everywhere. If it doesn't, we'll figure out our next best steps at that point.

Speaker 1

Great. At this time, I'd like to turn it over to the operator and begin taking live call-in questions.

Thank you. If you have a question at this time, please press star one. If you have a question at this time, please press star one. Our first question comes from Yousef Squali from Jefferies and Company. Your line is open.

Speaker 0

Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody. Reed, just a couple of questions or really one question going back to the DVD business. Clearly, as it starts atrophying, I'm just trying to understand what is the value of that business to you now outside of just being a cash cow. Are there any synergies that still exist between that and the streaming business, and if there is any value to actually keep it under the same umbrella? Thanks. Yousef, at this point, it's a source of profits funding our international expansion, and it's a source of satisfaction to the, you know, more than 10 million members who subscribe to our DVD-by-mail service, whether they also subscribe to streaming or not. We'll keep it and run it steadily and keep the service levels great for it. That would be the plan going forward.

Speaker 1

Thank you. If you have a question at this time, please press star one. Our next question comes from... If you have a question, please press star one.

Speaker 0

Our job, as we see it, is to try to anticipate your questions and answer as many of them proactively in our investor letter as possible. I'll take the absence of telephone questions that, at least in that dimension, we're doing a good job. We want to thank everyone for their support. We know it's been an extremely challenging time to be a shareholder over the last couple of months. I want to tell everyone that we are extremely focused on growing our streaming business on a global basis and believe it's a tremendous opportunity to create a very valuable and important and respected firm, and that that's what every day here at Netflix is spent doing. With that, thank you all very much.

Speaker 1

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's program. This concludes the program. You may all disconnect.