Will Netflix Have Twice As Much Content Next Year? Streaming Service Plans To Double Original Series

The binge-watching options for Netflix subscribers will soon multiply, as the streaming service plans to expand its original series offerings to 60 shows, double the current 30 choices, in 2017, Forbes reported.

Next year will mark the fifth year of Netflix’s “original content strategy,” and will bring more than 1,000 hours of original programming—up from 600 in 2016, according to a company earnings report.

Among those 60 scripted shows will be “Dear White People,” based on the 2014 movie of the same name, and “Ozark,” in which Jason Bateman returns to Netflix for a series that “explores capitalism, family dynamics and survival through the eyes of (anything but) ordinary Americans,” according to a Netflix press release.

To accommodate for the expansion in original producing, the Los Gatos, California-based streaming service also plans to boost its content budget to $6 billion, from $5 billion this year, the earnings report said. As Ville Salminen of the streaming news site Cordcutting.com told Forbes, the move may actually be a money-saver for Netflix, as it steers the company away from more costly licensed shows and movies.

“In absolute terms, $6 billion is, of course, more than $5 billion, but relatively Netflix is going to spend less on content in 2017 than in 2016 ,” Salminen told the magazine. “This is in line with what we’ve seen for years with the shrinking of Netflix’s library of licensed content.”

Netflix’s decision to make its own shows, rather than buying the rights to stream others, follows years of paring down its non-original offerings, prompting some to wonder whether the company has been quietly altering its entire business model.

Data compiled by Allflicks, which tracks Netflix’s offerings, showed that the streaming service cut its selection of movies and shows by nearly a third, to 4,335 movies and 1,197 shows in March from 6,494 movies and 1,609 shows at the start of 2014. As Simon Vella of the subscription software and analytics firm MPP Global wrote in a LinkedIn blog post on Netflix’s changing structure, “it would seem that the era of the massive content library is well and truly over.”