San Francisco:

Netflix added 18.9 million subscribers in its holiday quarter, blowing past Wall Street’s forecasts, with live sporting events and the return of its popular South Korean series “Squid Game” attracting a record number of new customers, the company reported on Tuesday.

The streaming giant said that as it continues to invest in programming that its members value, it will increase prices for the service for most plans in the U.S., Canada, Portugal and Argentina. In the U.S., the basic service with ads would increase by $1 a month to $7.99, a 14% price increase, while the premium package will cost $24.99, an increase of 9%.

Netflix said its fourth-quarter programming slate surpassed its internal expectations, with the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match becoming the most-streamed sporting event and the two National Football League games on Christmas Day delivering two of the most-streamed competitions in league history.

The service also benefited from the second season of its dystopian thriller “Squid Game,” which the company said is on track to become one of its most-watched original series. The company has the lowest rate of cancellations among the subscription streaming services, with a churn rate of 1.8% in December, according to researcher Antenna.

This quarter will also mark the last time Netflix reports subscriber additions, as the company emphasizes other performance metrics including revenue and profit – a change analysts attribute to slowing subscriber growth.

The company reported per-share earnings of $4.27, beating Wall Street’s forecast of $4.20 per share, according to an average of projections from 34 analysts. Annual operating income exceeded $10 billion for the first time in the company’s history.

Revenue rose 16% over the same time a year ago, to $10.2 billion, compared with Wall Street’s estimates of $10.1 billion for the quarter, according to LSEG.

“We enter 2025 with strong momentum,” Netflix said in its note to investors, saying it added a record 41 million subscribers in 2024 and re-accelerated growth.

The company revised its guidance, projecting revenue of $43.5 billion to $44.5 billion in 2025, an increase of a half-billion dollars over the prior forecast. The updated guidance reflects improved business fundamentals, the company said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Seoul, South Korea:

A factory turned into a battlefield, riot police armed with tasers and an activist who spent 100 days atop a chimney — the unrest that inspired Netflix’s most successful show ever has all the hallmarks of a TV drama.

This month sees the release of the second season of “Squid Game”, a dystopian vision of South Korea where desperate people compete in deadly versions of traditional children’s games for a massive cash prize.

But while the show itself is a work of fiction, Hwang Dong-hyuk, its director and writer, has said the experiences of the main character Gi-hun, a laid-off worker, were inspired by the violent Ssangyong strikes in 2009.

“I wanted to show that any ordinary middle-class person in the world we live in today can fall to the bottom of the economic ladder overnight,” he has said.

In May 2009, Ssangyong, a struggling car giant taken over by a consortium of banks and private investors, announced it was laying off more than 2,600 people, or nearly 40 percent of its workforce.

That was the beginning of an occupation of the factory and a 77-day strike that ended in clashes between strikers armed with slingshots and steel pipes and riot police wielding rubber bullets and tasers.

Many union members were severely beaten and some were jailed.

‘Many lost their lives’

The conflict did not end there.

Five years later, union leader Lee Chang-kun held a sit-in for 100 days on top of one of the factory’s chimneys to protest a sentence in favour of Ssangyong against the strikers.

He was supplied with food from a basket attached to a rope by supporters and endured hallucinations of a tent rope transformed into a writhing snake.

Some who experienced the unrest struggled to discuss “Squid Game” because of the trauma they endured, Lee told AFP.

The repercussions of the strike, compounded by protracted legal battles, caused significant financial and mental strain for workers and their families, resulting in around 30 deaths by suicide and stress-related issues, Lee said.

“Many have lost their lives. People had to suffer for too long,” he said.

He vividly remembers the police helicopters circling overhead, creating intense winds that ripped away workers’ raincoats.

Lee said he felt he could not give up.

“We were seen as incompetent breadwinners and outdated labour activists who had lost their minds,” he said.

“Police kept beating us even after we fell unconscious — this happened at our workplace, and it was broadcast for so many to see.”

Lee said he had been moved by scenes in the first season of “Squid Game” where Gi-hun struggles not to betray his fellow competitors.

But he wished the show had spurred real-life change for workers in a country marked by economic inequality, tense industrial relations and deeply polarised politics.

“Despite being widely discussed and consumed, it is disappointing that we have not channelled these conversations into more beneficial outcomes,” he said.

‘Shadow of state violence’

The success of “Squid Game” in 2021 left him feeling “empty and frustrated”.

“At the time, it felt like the story of the Ssangyong workers had been reduced to a commodity in the series,” Lee told AFP.

“Squid Game”, the streaming platform’s most-watched series of all time, is seen as embodying the country’s rise to a global cultural powerhouse, part of the “Korean wave” alongside the Oscar-winning “Parasite” and K-pop stars such as BTS.

But its second season comes as the Asian democracy finds itself embroiled in some of its worst political turmoil in decades, triggered by conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed bid to impose martial law this month.

Yoon has since been impeached and suspended from duties pending a ruling by the Constitutional Court.

That declaration of martial law risked sending the Korean wave “into the abyss”, around 3,000 people in the film industry, including “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho, said in a letter following Yoon’s shocking decision.

Vladimir Tikhonov, a Korean studies professor at the University of Oslo, told AFP that some of South Korea’s most successful cultural products highlight state and capitalist violence.

“It is a noteworthy and interesting phenomenon — we still live in the shadow of state violence, and this state violence is a recurrent theme in highly successful cultural products.”

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

New Delhi:

Director Soham Shah has filed a lawsuit against Netflix for allegedly plagiarising his 2009 film “Luck” to make the Korean series “Squid Game”, a claim the streamer on Sunday said holds no merit.

“This claim has no merit. ‘Squid Game’ was created by and written by Hwang Dong Hyuk and we intend to defend this matter vigorously,” a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement.

According to the documents of the lawsuit obtained by American outlet TMZ, “Squid Game” — which became the most watched series on Netflix when it premiered in 2021 — is a “rip-off” of the movie starring Imran Khan, Shruti Haasan, and Sanjay Dutt.

Created, written and directed by Hwang Dong Hyuk, “Squid Game” follows 456 players, all of them in deep financial debt, who were brought to a secret play to play a deadly children’s game for a chance to win a 45.6 billion won prize.

On the other hand, “Luck” revolves around an underworld kingpin who recruits people endowed with ‘luck’ from across the globe to take part in a series of challenges designed to test their chance factor, as gamblers around the world bet on them.

According to TMZ, in “Luck” “it’s only after characters start competing that they realize losing any of the challenges means death — and that the death of a fellow participant also increases the pot of money available to the remaining contestants”.

In the documents, Soham Shah also claimed that he wrote the story of the film around 2006 and the film released in July 2009.

In several interviews, Hwang has said he first came up with the idea for the Netflix series in 2008.

Soham Shah’s allegations come months ahead of the season two premiere of “Squid Game”, fronted by Korean star Lee Jung-jae, on December 26. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)