Netflix To Ramp Up Live Programming As ‘BTS

Netflix is all in on live programming.

After a number of its big-ticket live stunts such as The Roast of Kevin Hart, BTS: The Comeback Live – Arirang and Skyscraper Live performed well over the first six months of the year, the streamer said that it was doubling down on the nascent genre.

The Roast of Kevin Hart and BTS: The Comeback Live – Arirang both entered the Top 50 titles of the first half of 2026, per Netflix’s What We Watched report, with both specials scoring 21M views. In addition, Skyscraper Live, which saw Alex Honnold climb Taiwan skyscraper Taipei 101 without the use of ropes, got 13M views.

Not all live events broke through this year, however. Netflix streamed SAG-AFTRA’s Actor Awards live in March, and it picked up 2M views. This was down from the 4.3M views it received on Netflix last year.

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Star Search –– its live, big-ticket music competition hosted by Anthony Anderson and featuring a judging panel of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Chrissy Teigen and Jelly Roll — only just made it into the Top 1,000 titles.

Its premiere episode scored 2.6M views, but by its final three episodes, they were watched by only 600,000 viewers.

The performance of its concerts and roasts clearly has encouraged the company, with Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters both waxing lyrical about live on its second-quarter financial earnings call.

The company said that live event programming accounted for six of the top 10 new member sign-up days during the past five years.

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“We’re also really pleased with the investment so far in our live programming,” said Sarandos. “It plays a really important role driving acquisition, accelerating ad revenue, fueling conversation [and] helping us to launch new shows. It’s also helping us to understand what are the benefits of live over the over the entire catalog. We’re ramping up our live event slate.”

Earlier this week, Netflix streamed the 2026 Major League Baseball Home Run Derby for the first time. Sarandos said it became its most-watched program ever in Japan. “We’re continuing to lean into live events because they have a big, outsized positive on the business,” he added. “We’re going to continue to build out that global live event calendar and include expand it to include some regional live events as well.”

Peters noted that live events “do a lot of lifting for us for acquisition.” “They’re good for monetization. They drive ad revenue, fandom. They’re also a promotional platform, but they do not yield typically as many raw view hours. So, live we expect will be 5% of our content budget this year, but we think that’ll only be 1% of view hours,” he added.

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