The layoffs amount to roughly 6pc of Netflix’s last reported workforce of around 16,000.
Around 1,000 workers at Netflix are being laid off after co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos tell employees they need to be “disciplined” about prioritising people and resources.
The cuts will affect teams across the board, with product, technology, legal and human resources being significantly impacted by the layoffs. The Wall Street Journal first reported the story yesterday (14 October).
Peters and Sarandos’ memo announcing the layoffs – seen by several news publications – said that the company was investing in future grown and “high impact areas to improve [their] service.” The layoffs were part of a wider stream of “organisational changes”, it read.
Coming at around 6pc of Netflix’s last reported workforce of around 16,000 full-time employees, this latest round of job cuts are the biggest in the company since 2022. Around 2,500 workers are located in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.
As per the memo, the company will “continue to invest aggressively in high-impact areas” and make “focused choices across the business so [they] can keep delivering for [their] members, partners, employees and investors.”
The company has been trying a number of ways to get subscribers to spend more time on the platform, including through live programming.
In its latest earnings call, Peters said that live programming brings in a lot of new viewers. It does a “lot of lifting for us”, he said, bringing in monetisation and ad revenue while also acting as a promotional tool. Though they do not add as much to viewership.
The company announced a 13pc year-over-year growth in revenue in the quarter past, despite the Winter Olympics and the World Cup drawing viewership away from the platform.
Netflix utilises AI and generative AI across content creation, advertising and user interaction. Just this year alone, GenAI workflows have been used in roughly 300 Netflix titles, with the largest concentration of the technology use going in post-production.
“We are increasingly leveraging these tools to deliver higher quality output more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional methods,” it said.
Once the sole juggernaut in the online streaming space, services such as Amazon’s Prime Video and Disney + are catching up with Netflix with their market share. Meanwhile, HBO Max and Paramount + are now under the Skydance brand after Netflix’s attempted buyout of Warner Bros Discovery fell through earlier this year.
Netflix isn’t the sole streaming giant to be cutting jobs. Earlier this April, Disney cut 1,000 jobs in its first layoffs under new CEO Josh D’Amarobegins. This was followed by several hundred reported job cuts in subsequent rounds of layoffs at the company more recently. Amazon, meanwhile, cut 30,000 jobs across departments in less than a year as it continues to ramp up its AI spending.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.