Netflix Names Ted Sarandos New Co-CEO

Netflix on Thursday announced that Ted Sarandos will serve as co-CEO alongside co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings. Sarandos, a 20-year Netflix veteran, will also hold onto his title of Chief Content Officer and is joining the Netflix board of directors. 

The streaming service has also appointed Greg Peters to serve as Chief Operating Officer, in addition to his role as Chief Product Officer. 

"In terms of the day-to-day running of Netflix, I do not expect much to change," Hastings said in a statement. "Our key executive leadership groups are unchanged. So think of Ted's well deserved promotion formalizing how we already run the business today."

The company also reported its second quarter financial figures, producing mixed results.  

Diluted earnings per share for the quarter came to $1.59. Revenue in Q2 was $6.148 billion, growing 25 percent year-over-year. 

Analysts were looking for earnings of $1.81 on revenue of $6.08 billion. 

Netflix added 10.1 million paid memberships in Q2, compared with 2.7 million in last year's Q2. While that figure beat Netflix's own expectations, the company said it doesn't expect that momentum to continue into the second half of the year. 

"The positive variance relative to our 7.5m forecast was due to better-than-forecast acquisition and retention," the company said. "In the first half of this year, we've added 26m paid memberships, nearly on par with the 28m we achieved in all of 2019. However, as we expected (and can be seen in the graph below), growth is slowing as consumers get through the initial shock of Covid and social restrictions." 

For the third quarter, Netflix expects to add 2.5 million paid memberships, compared with 6.8 million in the prior year quarter. 

Meanwhile, the company outlined how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is impacting its content production schedule. Netflix is "slowly resuming productions in many parts of the world," its release said, with the most progress in Asia Pacific. Production has resumed in many EMEA countries, including Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Italy and the UK. Some production has resumed in California and Oregon, but the current infection trends in the US creates more uncertainty. The company is aiming to resume production in Latin America and India later this year.