Ted Sarandos Admits Netflix Is “Not Growing as Fast as I Want Us To”

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos acknowledged his streaming service’s slowed growth in engagement — Netflix viewership grew just 2 percent over the first half of 2026.

“Overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on on making that move faster,” Sarandos said Wednesday evening at Bloomberg‘s 2026 Screentime event.

One potential kickstart to engagement is the service’s move to live programming, including the NFL. Netflix spends about 5 percent of its content investment on live programming, which in turn generates about 1 percent of viewership, Sarandos said.

What live is especially good at, however, is generating “a lot of signups,” Sarandos said. It also helps to reduce churn — and advertisers love it.

“The business is great and growing fine,” Sarandos said.

There was a time when Netflix was racing to become HBO before HBO became Netflix, as Sarandos famously said. Today, it appears to have YouTube in its crosshairs in a similar manner. But Netflix’s recent deals with YouTube creators does not define it, Sarandos said.

“We’re definitely… not in the UGC [user-generated content] business,” he told Bloomberg‘s Lucas Shaw. “We’re in the professionally produced content business. Now, I think there’s a bunch of people on platforms that are doing pretty close to professional programming already, and if we can better monetize that programming for them, then we can make a deal with them. But we’re definitely not trying to bring over the whole population of creators.”

Sarandos was also asked if he regrets Netflix’s (temporarily) winning bid for Warner Bros. Netflix had an agreement in place before David Ellison swooped in with a huge check backed by his billionaire father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison. That deal was finally given the go-ahead by a judge earlier today.

“No, I think the plan was solid,” he responded. “We won the deal at some point, so we think we priced it right — at our scale. That was the top price point where I thought we could return value to our shareholders with that asset. Any more than that, I thought we’d be taking it into negative territory — even with our scale.”

A bit later in the conversation, Sarandos clarified that Netflix will not be doing a free tier, referring to a completely ad-supported model. No version of that would be worth “cannibalizing the core product,” he explained.