For a company that has a fairly tempered view about sports, Netflix still saw significant impact from live sports programming in its latest quarterly earnings.
The streaming giant said late Tuesday that it generated $12.05 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter of 2025, up 18%, while net income grew 29% to $2.42 billion. Both marks beat analyst estimates, and concluded a year in which Netflix met or exceeded all of its financial goals.
The banner results follow a historic end to the quarter in which a Lions-Vikings game that was part of Netflix’s NFL doubleheader on Christmas briefly held the league’s streaming record, with an average audience of 27.5 million. Though the mark was broken less than three weeks later by Amazon, the Netflix NFL games also formed a material part of a series of records for all of U.S. streaming in December.
Netflix also said in a letter to shareholders that key events such as the NFL games drove “disproportionate excitement and signups” for the service.
“We’re starting to see benefits to retention, too,” from live events, particularly in sports, said Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos in an earnings call Tuesday.
Those results, and the comments from Sarandos, came despite the fact that Netflix continues to shy away from standard, full-season rights packages with top sports leagues, instead choosing to focus on big events. The company’s newly completed MLB rights agreement, focused on key elements such as Opening Night and the Home Run Derby, and a separate, Japan-based deal for the World Baseball Classic, follow the same course.
With the end of the fiscal year, Netflix also disclosed an updated global subscriber count of 325 million, by far the largest total of any major platform doing business in the U.S.
WBD Considerations
The latest results for Netflix follow a third quarter of 2025 that saw a 17% boost in revenue and an 8% jump in net income. Of course, much has changed for the company compared to just three months ago. After insisting during that prior earnings call that “nothing is a must” in terms of an acquisition, Netflix struck an $82.7 billion agreement in early December to acquire the streaming and studios businesses of TNT Sports parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.
Amid flagging Netflix shares and continued hostile push from rival suitor Paramount, the WBD bid has now been converted to an all-cash structure. Just hours after unveiling that revised plan on Tuesday, Netflix reiterated its view that the new deal structure will allow for a quicker closing and greater certainty overall.
“We see this as a strategic accelerant,” Sarandos said about WBD. “This is really a vertical deal for us, and something that’s very complementary.”
Netflix and WBD are now targeting April to bring the merger plan before WBD shareholders for approval. Investors, however, remain insistent in their pursuit for even greater growth, and sent Netflix shares down nearly 5% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.
