Netflix, the big subscription digital video company, is estimated to only get bigger — growing to 87 million pay subscribers in 12 years.
Todd Juenger, senior media analyst at Bernstein Research, estimates Netflix will hit nearly 90 million subscribers by 2030 from its current base of 57 million U.S. this year.
Most of those new customers could be today’s younger TV-video consumers. Juenger adds that an estimated 80 million U.S. adults have the internet but do not have Netflix, and many of them are young.
“We find that Netflix subscribers skew young, as expected,” he writes in a recent report. “But that puts time on Netflix’s side. As the population ages and replaces the cohorts ahead of them, they replace their preceding generation with higher penetration rates.”
Bernstein Research fielded a study, profiling Netflix’s U.S. subscriber base, to identify the opportunities for future subscriber growth. This came from 1,000 random respondents representative of the U.S. Internet population, fielded on May 25, 2018.
Bernstein says that 82% of survey respondents ages 18-49 already have access to Netflix. This compares to only 44% of adults 50-64, and 22% of adults 65+.
The 90-million-mark may seem aggressive, says Juenger, but he says it is “worth remembering that conventional U.S. pay TV peaked at about 100 million… We believe Netflix is a superior product for entertainment programming, in almost every way, compared to conventional TV, so why not?”
