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People became even more addicted to Netflix in 2015, according to Goldman Sachs (NFLX)

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/subscribers-spent-more-time-per-person-watching-netflix-in-2015-2016-1

Thomson Reuters

Netflix subscribers watched 13% more Netflix per user in 2015 than in 2014, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs.

Last week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings dropped bombshell news that Netflix had expanded to 130 more countries, placing it in almost every country in the world except China.

But beyond the expansion, Hastings shared numbers that suggest we are more addicted to Netflix than ever before. Hastings said users watched a total of 42.5 billion streaming hours of content in 2015, compared to 29.1 billion in 2014.

Using subscriber estimates, analysts at Goldman Sachs and other firms then calculated approximately how much growth there was in the hours of Netflix watched per subscriber. The consensus was between 12-13%.

This chart from UBS shows what this number means in absolute terms. UBS estimates that hours watched per subscriber, per day, went from 1.6 to 1.8, meaning an extra 6 hours of Netflix per month.

Thomson Reuters

This is good news for Netflix, since it suggests that the service is becoming more valuable to people. This fact could be crucial if Netflix is forced to hike prices due to the rising cost of producing its own original content.

Netflix has said it will roughly double its output of original shows to 31 in 201. That level of production will not be cheap, and Netflix has indicated that it plans to spend $5 billion on content in 2016.

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