It’s no secret that Netflix is constantly on the hunt for new content: The streaming service has one of the most aggressive development budgets in the industry, spending an estimated $6 billion on content in 2017. (Only ESPN, which has to contend with pricey sports league licensing deals, spent more.) Those giant piles of cash are apparently paying off, though, with CCO Ted Sarandos announcing this week that his company is set to play host to 1,000 original shows and movies by the end of 2018.
To be clear: We’re not using “a thousand” here as a placeholder for “any arbitrarily big number.” Sarandos said that the network will actually have 10 to the power of 3 original shows and movies on its roster—with 470 of them arriving between now and the end of 2018. (And, as the people who will have to watch, think about, and review each and every drop in this oncoming content deluge, we here at The A.V. Club would just like to say: Gee, thanks, Ted!)
Netflix is expected to spend a total of $8 billion on shows and movies this year, with a lot of that cash going to the acquisition of Big Names; Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes have both jumped ship from Fox and ABC—the networks they’ve both helped respectively define for the last decade or so of American TV—in the last few months. The service has also continued in its aggressive push to acquire shows from foreign markets and bring them to its Stateside library; most recently, it made a big push for its Danish post-apocalyptic teen thriller The Rain.