Disney last week launched its Disney Plus service in the USA, which offers a range of Disney, Pixar and Star Wars films for $6.99 a month - much less than the $13 that Netflix charges Americans for its standard package.
Netflix added 9.6 million total new subscribers in the quarter, up 16% from a year ago.
Wall Street is eagerly awaiting Netflix's first-quarter earnings, which are scheduled to be released on Tuesday evening after market close.
Shares of Netflix traded down about 1 per cent at US$355.02 after-the-bell, paring losses following a deeper sell-off just after the results were released. Its worth noting that revenue from global streaming overtook United States revenue in 2018; for this quarter, Q1 worldwide revenue was $2.3 billion, while USA revenue was $2 billion.
Netflix spent US$7.5-billion on TV shows and movies for 2018, and executives have said that amount will grow in 2019.
Indeed, considering how big The Walt Disney Company's media empire was already, there wouldn't have been much more benefit to buying all that stuff from Fox if they weren't somehow going to make even more money off of it. The big news is that it will indeed be priced lower than Netflix at $6.99 and it will launch in the US market on November 12, 2019.
Analyst Bryan Kraft said Netflix is becoming "a cultural necessity for people around the world".
Bank of America analyst Nat Schindler wrote that his firm was similarly not concerned.
Marvel head Kevin Feige took to the stage at today's Disney Investor Day to talk about how the new Disney+ streaming service will factor into the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Back in January the word in the Switch rumour mill was that the new console would have an upgraded 1080p OLED touchscreen display (the original Switch only has a 720p LCD one), however no other specs were forthcoming, something that hasn't changed.
"We don't anticipate that these new entrants will materially affect our growth because the transition from linear to on-demand entertainment is so massive and because of the differing nature of our content offerings", Netflix boss Reed Hastings told investors during an earnings call. "After all, they are a tech company at heart and have enormous power with the data they capture on their millions of subscribers, which helps them design what original content to create".