With all the AI talk, it feels like 2023 again at Netflix.
Netflix reported its quarterly earnings on Tuesday, and revenue was $11.51 billion—slightly below Bloomberg’s forecast of $11.52 billion. Earnings per share were $5.87, below an estimate of $6.94. (All of this is per Yahoo! Finance). Not catastrophic, but not great. The company’s stock price went down by 5.6%.
But hey, how about all that AI?
In its shareholder letter, and then again in its earnings call, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters touted coming generative AI implementation as an exciting new development across content generation, user experience, and in advertising. All the AI talk made it feel like it was 2023 again.
To illustrate how much AI seems to be on the CEOs’ minds, at 26 minutes and 34 seconds into the earnings call, Peters gives an answer in which he rattles off what seems to be an ad-hoc list of six challenges Netflix faces as a company, starting with creating TV and movies around the world. Implementing AI is the second item he mentions.
The shareholder letter kicked off the topic of AI with what is actually a pretty big truth bomb: “For many years now, ML and AI have been powering our title recommendations as well as production and promotion technology.
