Whenever Netflix announces another price hike (it’s basically an annual tradition at this point), the trades and the streamer’s massive audience inevitably grumble and warn of a potential subscriber exodus. And yet, there’s a good reason the complaints fall on deaf ears. Sure, Ted Sarandos and Bela Bajaria’s push into the sports realm is usually cited as the reason why the company needs to increase prices, and not all their customers are clamoring to watch the next Jake Paul fight or MLB’s Opening Night. But for executives making the call, there’s only one metric that matters: subscriber churn, which has hovered around 2 percent for years at Netflix, according to Antenna.

As everyone knows, that’s far below the average churn rate at most other premium streamers, which shed subscribers at between 4 and 6 percent each month between February 2025 and February 2026. (A few outliers, including Peacock and Paramount+, have experienced churn between 7 and 10 percent.) The only service within spitting distance has been the Disney+ and Hulu bundle, which sits at less than 3 percent. The takeaway is unavoidable: Despite semiregular price increases, Netflix’s value proposition remains unmatched.

At this point, the biggest question facing Netflix finance chief Spencer Neumann is how much customers are actually willing to pay. Most people get sticker shock eventually—even if the higher fees are contributing to even better content, including costly live sports rights that have expanded Netflix’s TAM. But there are a few paths that Netflix can take to keep subscribers in the funnel while carefully hiking up the cost.

Meanwhile, conventional wisdom holds that sports are one of the best ways to keep users from churning. And while there’s plenty of data underscoring the value of sports content, Hub Research’s latest report on the streaming space revealed that sports aren’t among the primary reasons Netflix customers keep the service—ease of use and exclusive series both ranked higher. It’s a reminder that sports can be a surprisingly complicated value prop for any general-entertainment platform, which is a good lesson as rival services try to offset sports rights investments with price increases. Amazon, for example, told users that their Prime memberships were increasing because of the NFL, which isn’t great messaging for those who don’t care about Thursday Night Football.

Indeed, Netflix needs to continue selling users on the breadth of content beyond the latest eventized game or tournament. Streaming has hit saturation in the U.S., and the two most potent growth levers remaining are price increases and churn reduction. The end of last year marked the first time that streaming growth fell into single digits, according to Antenna, as total subscribers grew by about 7 percent—about half of what it was in the same period of 2024. Still, Netflix accounted for about one-quarter of all new additions in Q4, about 10 percentage points higher than Disney+ and Hulu.

The uncomfortable truth for many in the industry is that Netflix has come closer than any other company to re-creating the cable bundle. Its licensed procedural programming and comedies have effectively replicated the lean-back experience that was once the domain of broadcast; its premium entertainment competes with the likes of HBO and FX; and the slow introduction of sports is only cementing its status as the stickiest streaming service. Industry insiders keep asking how much more Netflix can ask of its customers—and, based on the data, it seems there’s still a lot of goodwill left.

Thanks, Julia. See you all on Thursday.

John