About 300 Netflix Programs Used Generative AI This Year, Company Reveals

Roughly 300 Netflix programs across the streamer’s library have used generative AI across their production process this year, the company revealed in its second-quarter earnings report on Thursday.

Netflix told shareholders in a letter that the technology’s usage expands across every level of a program’s production process, from its concept and pre-visualization to post-production and release. The company singled out programs like its Indian sports thriller series “Glory,” its Brazilian soccer miniseries “Brasil 70: A Saga do Tri” and its American Revolution-focused docuseries “The American Experiment” for their uses of the technology, which Netflix said helped create “highly complex sequences” that included enhanced crowd sizes and battle sequences.

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“We are increasingly leveraging these tools to deliver higher quality output more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional methods,” the company said. “In some cases, productions would have had to leave out key shots and sequences in the absence of GenAI technology.”

The disclosure came as Netflix’s second-quarter revenue hit $12.56 billion, up 13.4% year over year, with a net income of $3.4 billion (translating to 80 cents per share). On average, Wall Street analysts expected $12.59 billion and earnings per share of 79 cents, according to LSEG Data & Analytics. Shares at the company dropped more than 8% in after-hours trading Thursday.

The streaming giant has been vocal about adopting AI for various sectors of its business, including helping users find new titles, fueling its advertising business and building an AI animation studio. Netflix in March also acquired the Ben Affleck-founded company InterPositive, which it said would help provide filmmakers with AI tools to use throughout film and TV productions.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on the company’s earnings call Thursday that, while the InterPositive deal was still in its “early days,” the company has seen its impact on productions alongside some of its other in-house tools.

AI tools give “creatives better tools to bring their visions to life,” Sarandos added, pointing to 17 minutes of AI-enhanced footage in “The American Experiment” that he claimed “expanded the scope of the series that just wouldn’t have been feasible before” and that were produced “twice as fast and at half the cost of previous options.”

Still, Sarandos distanced Netflix from the notion of producing AI-generated work.

“We believe it takes great artists to make something great, and AI is not changing that,” he said. “Movies are being made by people who make movies. AI provides them with better tools to make them even better.”

The Thursday remarks echoed Sarandos’ comments to Politico in March, where he said AI “should be a creator tool,” similar to other production tools that have evolved over time, and that it could afford creators the opportunity to do things impossible before the technology emerged.

However, he said AI could only make things “faster and cheaper” if a high bar of quality followed. “I don’t think faster and cheaper matters if it’s not better,” he told the outlet.

“I do think that AI, particularly InterPositive, the company we bought from Ben, will help creators make things better,” he added. “Using their own dailies, using their own production materials to make the film that they’re making better. Still requires writers and actors and lighting techs and all the things that you’d use to make a movie, but be able to make the movie more effective, more efficient.”