Posted August 18, 2018 05:16:48 Netflix, one of the biggest companies in the video streaming business, is not yet ready to match Apple’s own iTunes store in terms of its video service offerings, its chief content officer said Wednesday.
The company said it will launch a “streaming video app for iOS devices” later this year and would roll out the app “at a time of our choosing,” according to a company statement.
Netflix is not making any plans to offer its own streaming service, and it has no plans to license the platform to third-party developers.
In its earnings call with analysts last week, CEO Reed Hastings said the company is “still in the early stages of building a product.”
But Netflix has recently focused more on selling the app to consumers, rather than just offering it for free.
In the earnings call, Hastings said that “in the near term” Netflix is “investing heavily” in the app, but “we don’t yet have a product that we can call ‘streaming’ that we want to be able to charge for.”
Netflix is the biggest player in the streaming video space.
The company has been making big investments in its content in recent years, with the purchase of the entire streaming video business in the last year.
Its current offering includes the streaming service called “Hulu Plus,” as well as standalone video-on-demand services.
Netflix’s new offering, which it says is the company’s “first and foremost” video streaming app, will offer customers access to Netflix content in its own exclusive streaming library, and will come with its own unique payment model.
Hastings acknowledged in the earnings conference call that Netflix is looking for a “more robust content offering” and said the service’s subscription fee will “probably go up” next year, although he did not elaborate.
The news comes just weeks after Hastings and other executives said they are confident that Netflix will be able compete with iTunes, the online store that Apple owns.
The move comes as Netflix is preparing to launch its own app in the coming weeks, following its acquisition of Time Warner’s video streaming service.
Hastings also told analysts last month that Netflix wants to get into the streaming music market, a key area of growth for the company.
The streaming video market is projected to grow by 12% in 2019 to $9.8 billion, according to Nielsen, which is expected to be a record for the category.
