Netflix held its Q1 earnings call on Monday talking about plethora of topics from pricing changes to Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Naturally, its original series House of Cards and Orange is the New Black came up. The former’s second season was released during the quarter, and the latter’s will debut in June.
The company is often asked about and criticized for the way it measures the success of its shows, or doesn’t provide much in the way of specifics, but the company is clearly pleased with the performance of both shows so far.
“We’re getting more sophisticated about how how we measure it,” said Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos of House of Cards. “I think that what we see is a hungry audience for season 2 versus a curious audience in Season 1. In Season 1, subscribers had no idea what a Netflix original series would be like, so there was some curiosity, but certainly not a lot of excitement going in. In Season 2 there was a lot of pent up demand. We saw a lot of very early front-weighted viewing for the launch, which kind of told us that America was ready for more, and dug in right away…We’ve been absolutely thrilled so far with the show from the early launch relative to how you’d measure television – any show on basic cable or premium cable.”
“We’re committing to larger budget shows, and the same show is more expensive to make year on year,” he said. “We’re looking at – the kinds of shows that we’re competing with – we’re still only competing with kind of the top end of cable for those shows. So think about it like a sports team, where the bidding can get quite high on a couple of key pieces of talent, but the overall salaries stay kind of in check.”
Asked about the upcoming season of Orange is the New Black, he said, “We had said before Orange is the New Black has been our most watched show, so we’re pretty excited to see what an even bigger mob looks like, who is hungry for Season 2 starting June 6th.”
The first real trailer was released last week.
House of Cards: Season 2 will come out on DVD and Blu-ray on June 19th.
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