Netflix just needs a minute of your time to explain why it wants to more than double the $900 million in debt it already has. See, it’s just been a rough couple of months, because its friend Tommy was supposed to buy Vampire Weekend tickets and that got messed up, so it missed a few student loan payments, and now it’s just couch surfing for a few weeks while it figures some stuff out. But Netflix watched an episode of The Suze Orman Show the other night while high, and it has an idea: Variety reports that the company has announced a plan to raise $1 billion in debt in order to finance a broad swath of content.
Much like how switching all of your debt over to a new credit card so you could still go to raves on the weekend totally worked in college, the streaming service has decided that the current “favorable interest-rate environment” makes it the right time to rack up $1 billion in debt. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells argued in a letter to shareholders that long-term debt was the best way to finance their ambitious plans for the coming year. The company wants to increase the amount of cash used for projects in the first part of 2015, including the new season of House Of Cards, which debuts on February 27.
All in all, Netflix plans to upload 320 hours of original content this year, including series, documentaries, films and stand-up specials—three times the amount of content it produced in 2014. This means that the day is not far off when Netflix, like Marvel, will simply have a continuous stream of new content that you can plug straight into your Netflix brain port, also no doubt scheduled for release sometime next year.