Netflix confirmed in August last year that it would be spending a huge amount of money on original movies and TV series in 2018, with plans to still license a majority of its content. The company has now moved to fulfill that plan after CFO David Wells stated at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco that Netflix will invest $8 billion in approximately 700 original TV series and movies it plans to add to its offering this year.
The planned investment marks a $2 billion hike from the amount Netflix spent on original content last year. Earlier this month, Netflix released one of its most expensive original production Altered Carbon, a sci-fi TV series based on a novel of the same name written by Richard K. Morgan. Other original titles expected to be released by Netflix this year include a TV remake of the 1998 sci-fi adventure film Lost in Space and the mini-series The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Included in the approximately 700 original productions are 80 non-English original productions from outside the U.S.; an example of a successful non-English title is the German-language sci-fi thriller Dark, which has managed to gained popularity outside of Germany, according to Deadline.
It is perhaps worth noting that a huge portion of the source of the investment is Netflix"s revenue from subscriptions. In October 2017, the video streaming service raised the subscription fee for its standard plan with HD streaming from $9.99 to $10.99. The price hike also increased the fee for the 4K HDR-enabled streaming plan from $11.99 to $13.99.
Last month, Netflix reached a market cap of $100 billion, thanks to its better-than-expected subscription growth that saw the company gaining 8.33 million more subscribers worldwide during the final quarter of 2017. With the planned addition of hundreds of new content, the service"s subscriber base is expected to grow.