AMC Networks Expects 9 Million Streaming Subscribers by End of 2021 in Good News for Niche Streamers
AMC Networks reported strong financial results and gains for its various streaming services in the company’s Q2 2021 earnings report on Friday.
The company, which operates streaming services such as Acorn TV, AMC+, Allblk, and Shudder, among others, reported revenue of $771.39 billion, around a 19 percent increase from the company’s Q2 2020 revenue. AMC Networks’ Q2 revenue handily beat Wall Street’s expectations of $687.37 billion, per data from Yahoo Finance, and sent its stock up 6.42 percent at press time.
AMC Networks also offered an optimistic outlook for its various streaming services and stated that it expects to have at least 9 million paid streaming subscribers across its streaming platforms; its longer-term goal is to have between 20 million and 25 million paid streaming subscribers by 2025.
“For our subscribers, our targeted services represent reliable destinations for the kind of content that they identify with, whether that’s character-driven dramas that define the AMC brand on AMC+, Black TV and film on Allblk, or British and internationally focused mysteries on Acorn TV,” AMC Networks CEO Josh Sapan said in the company’s Q2 2021 earnings call on Friday.
“Very importantly, across all these, we are not competing with the big something-for-everyone offerings — rather, we are complements to them,” he said. “Unlike those, if I might call them mainstream services, we don’t need to spend tens of billions of dollars creating content across multiple categories in order to satisfy every member of the household and grow to enormous scale. This is, in turn, providing us with a very attractive economic model that is enabling us to significantly reorient our company toward a unique streaming future.”
The company said subscription revenue was up 21 percent but did not offer a specific breakdown on how many subscribers it has at any of its streaming services.
AMC Networks also posted strong domestic advertising revenue of $212 million, a 13 percent increase from last year, which can likely be partially attributed to the company’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. Gains in the company’s international revenue, which are not a major part of AMC Networks’ business, were particularly high; the company reported $26 million in international advertising revenue, which is a 75 percent increase that the company attributed to higher prices and stronger ratings.
