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Netflix chief bulks up on series (600 hours!)

Gary Levin
USA TODAY
Krysten Ritter stars in the Netflix series 'Marvel's Jessica Jones," renewed for Season 2 at Netflix.

PASADENA, Calif.—Netflix original content chief Ted Sarandos plans 600 hours of original series this year, including 31 shows aimed at adults, and with 70 million global subscribers, says there's more to come.

Echoing a popular industry refrain, he asked, "Is there too much TV? We don’t think there is too much, and if there is, someone else will have to slow down."

Among upcoming series are a Full House reboot, a return to DeGrassi High, new seasons of House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, and a bigger push into kids programming, with 20 new series planned, for a total of 35. Kids and family programming are seen as drivers of subscription growth).

And it more easily crosses borders.

"The global appeal of Full House is incredible," Sarandos told the Television Critics Association Sunday. "People grew up on this show in India, Dubai, France and Korea. The idea that they can experience Fuller House at the exact same moment" is "one that is not comparable on business and cultural terms."

Here's your 2016 Netflix series schedule

While some producers are reluctant to give Netflix global rights to their shows, compromising their value to foreign broadcasters, "the ultimate goal is that Netflix is basically the same everywhere in the world."

Sarandos wouldn't comment on rumored plans to reboot Lost in Space and Gilmore Girls. He wouldn't comment on rumored plans for a Marvel series based on Punishers, and says any character is ripe for a spinoff. (The Defenders is its most "complex" effort, and the schedule for that will determine timing for future seasons of other series). And he says another Arrested Development reunion still hinges on a deal with 20th Century Fox.

But he responded to a presentation by NBC last week that purported to show young-adult audience levels for recent Netflix fare based on research that tracks viewership using audio recorded by cellphones.

"Their methodology and measurement doesn’t reflect any sense of reality that we measure," Sarandos said in response, calling the cited (and sometimes impressive) figures "remarkably inaccurate." And viewership among adults ages 18 to 49, the currency of the commercial TV business, "is so insignificant to us that we can’t even track how many 18-49 subscribers we have."

Sarandos says that, like HBO and Showtime, "ratings themselves have no specific impact on our business. If we were spending a lot of money on shows they weren’t watching, they would quit. You can cancel your Netflix with one click."

And revealing viewership data would create its own hurdles.

"Once we give a number for a show, every show will be benchmarked with that number," Sarandos said. "That puts a lot of creative pressure on the talent that we don’t want to.  If we turn it into a weekly arms race…I think it’s going to have the same result it’s had on teevision, which I think has been remarkably negative in terms of the quality of shows."

There's been some volatility in Netflix's stock, and some fear that Netflix's aggressive spending on content, which Sarandos pegged at $6 billion in cash this year, may hurt profits. But he says the service has been "transformed from a distribution platform dependent on library titles to a home for original content that people want to see," and that future profits will depend more on the pace of global subscriber growth than the amount it spends on programming.

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