Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said Wednesday that while the streamer’s strategy for continued growth is sound, it needs “better execution” of that strategy — particularly in the United States.
He also said that incoming chief content officer Peter Rice will provide the leadership to deliver on that promise.
“The business and the business flywheel are working. There’s no need for a fundamental shift in strategy,” Sarandos said on a call to discuss Netflix’s third quarter earnings. “We do need better execution in the U.S. Our content around the world is largely working. … The U.S. is also working. It’s just not growing as fast as it could or as fast as we’d like.
“We had some really solid doubles and triples this year,” Sarandos continued, referring to Netflix’s 2026 releases. “But the other territories count on some of those titles being home runs so they’ll travel around the world. So we’re really focusing on that execution.”
Rice, a former Disney and Fox executive, was hired as chief content officer last week — he starts the job on Oct. 26 — after Bela Bajaria was let go. Sarandos praised Bajaria “put a lot of hits on the board” and built the international team that has contributed to Netflix’s growth outside the U.S. and Canada. But as U.S. growth has slowed, Netflix made a change.
Sarandos noted that reaction to Rice’s hiring within the industry has been very positive, and that his experience in all aspects of the business — movies and television, linear and streaming — is what Netflix needs.
“His creative instincts and business acumen are remarkable,” Sarandos said of Rice. “He’s an at-scale quality and volume operator, and he does it across every imaginable form of entertainment. … Most importantly, Peter Rice understands talent relations. In a competitive market, creative talent have choices where they want to work. We want Netflix to always be the place that they do the best work of their lives. Peter is the exact right person to lead those efforts in the U.S. and around the world.”
Co-CEO Greg Peters also addressed the layoffs of 1,000 employees last week, saying there were some areas where Netflix had “overinvested.”
“When you’ve driven considerable top line growth as we have over the last several years, and you’re in a highly dynamic market that’s constantly changing, I don’t think it’s unusual then to find that there are some areas that we built quickly and we ended up overinvested in, or there are opportunities to adjust how we are operating to best drive the business through the next stage of growth,” Peters said.
The Netflix co-chief added, “We prefer to make these adjustments organically and iteratively. That’s the best way to do it. We think it’s our mission basically to constantly be trying to tune and adjust, but sometimes the team needs a forcing function. The company needs a mandate that requires the whole organization to ask hard questions about where can we be more efficient, where can we make tough decisions about where we can trim or redirect how we’re investing.”
Additional reporting by Caitlin Huston.