Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos acknowledged this week that the streaming giant is “not growing as fast as I want us to,” a candid admission that lands as the company’s share price keeps sliding, according to a report by the Hollywood Reporter.
Speaking at Bloomberg’s 2026 Screentime event, Sarandos framed the shortfall as a work in progress. “Overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster,” he said. The remark, first surfaced by Breitbart News, offered a rare public concession from a company long positioned as the undisputed king of the streaming wars.
The comment drew immediate attention because it arrived just weeks after Wall Street punished Netflix for what analysts described as worrying trends in user engagement. As Breitbart News reported, shares fell five percent last month after Wells Fargo downgraded the stock, a move that underscored investor anxiety about whether the platform can sustain its historic growth trajectory.
A Bet on Live Events
Sarandos spent much of his appearance defending Netflix’s expensive push into live programming, including high-profile NFL games that have become a centerpiece of the company’s engagement strategy. The pivot toward sports and live events is widely seen as an attempt to spark the kind of appointment viewing that on-demand libraries struggle to generate.
The economics, by Sarandos’s own accounting, remain lopsided. He noted that Netflix devotes roughly five percent of its $20 billion annual content budget to live programming, yet those expenditures account for only about one percent of total viewership — a return on investment that is far from compelling.
Still, the co-CEO insisted the live bet is paying off in other ways. He said live programming has driven a significant number of new sign-ups and has helped limit subscriber cancellations, even if the raw viewing-time numbers don’t yet justify the spending on a per-hour basis.
The company has reported only two-percent viewership growth over the first half of 2026, a figure that helps explain both the investor jitters and Sarandos’s mixed messaging. Growth of that magnitude would be unremarkable for a mature media company but stands out for a streamer that spent years posting double-digit gains.
Backpedaling and Boundary-Drawing
Perhaps sensing that his earlier remark had landed poorly, Sarandos later appeared to walk it back. “The business is great and growing fine,” he said, a formulation that sat uneasily alongside his own acknowledgment that growth is lagging behind his ambitions.
The co-CEO also used the appearance to draw a firm boundary around what Netflix is — and isn’t. “We’re definitely… not in the UGC [user-generated content] business,” he said, adding, “We’re in the professionally produced content business.” The distinction matters as YouTube and TikTok continue to vacuum up viewing hours, particularly among younger audiences. Sarandos’s comments signal that Netflix has no intention of chasing that model directly, even as competition for attention intensifies.
Netflix declined to comment beyond Sarandos’s public remarks.
No Regrets on Warner Bros.
Sarandos was also asked whether he regrets Netflix’s short-lived winning bid for Warner Bros. — but not the Discovery assets — a maneuver that ultimately unraveled and left the industry speculating about what might have been.
His answer was blunt: “Nahhh.”
“I think the plan was solid,” he said. “We won the deal at some point, so we think we priced it right — at our scale.”
He elaborated that the offer represented the outer limit of what Netflix could justify to its shareholders. “That was the top price point where I thought we could return value to our shareholders with that asset,” Sarandos said. “Any more than that, I thought we’d be taking it into negative territory — even with our scale.”
The Warner Bros. episode remains a touchstone for questions about Netflix’s appetite for large-scale consolidation. Sarandos’s remarks suggest the company is comfortable walking away from deals that don’t pencil out, a posture that could reassure investors worried about overspending — or frustrate those hoping for a more aggressive expansion play.
Investor Patience Wearing Thin
For all the talk of live sports and disciplined dealmaking, the market’s immediate concern is simpler: Netflix’s stock is heading in the wrong direction. The Wells Fargo downgrade cited engagement trends, and Sarandos’s own words did little to dispel the underlying worry that the company’s best growth years may be behind it.
At the same time, the co-CEO’s insistence that live programming is adding subscribers and reducing churn points to a subtler strategy. If Netflix can convert sports fans into long-term subscribers — even if those viewers spend most of their time elsewhere on the platform — the calculus changes. The question is whether that conversion is happening fast enough to satisfy Wall Street.
Sarandos’s appearance at Bloomberg’s Screentime event was billed as a wide-ranging conversation about the future of entertainment. In practice, it became a window into a company navigating a tricky transition: still dominant, still profitable, but no longer growing at the pace that once made it a market darling.
Whether his reassurances — “growing fine” — will quiet investors or simply highlight the gap between ambition and reality is a question the next earnings report may answer.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2026/10/03/ted-sarandos-admits-netflix-is-struggling-to-grow-as-stock-continues-downward-slide/