New York (AFP)

Online streaming giant Netflix suffered an unexpected setback in the second quarter, attracting far fewer new subscribers than expected, just as the competition intensified.

The sanction was immediate on Wall Street where the stock was down more than 10% in electronic trading after the close of the stock market.

Netflix has not only registered 2.7 million new paid subscriptions between April and June, when it was expecting 5 million. But he even lost it in the United States.

The group refuses to attribute this poor performance to competition which, according to it, has not changed much during the period under review.

It is however intense on the sector with Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO - which diffused in particular the series "Game of Thrones" -, BBC, Youtube and Hotstar (Indian group). And it should intensify in the coming months with the arrival of new offers from Disney, Apple or WarnerMedia and NBC Universal.

Netflix already knows that it will lose flagship series like "Friends" or "The Office", still watched by many fans.

But the Californian group sees an advantage: it should allow it to release funding to create even more original content.

The American group, however, is already spending billions of dollars every year on original content - the price of the war to attract the audience - especially in specific creations for foreign markets.

- Price increase -

To explain the slowdown in the second quarter, Netflix especially advance that the new content did not seduce as much as expected despite the success of some nuggets like the series "Dead to Me", documentaries on nature and animals narrated by the British David Attenborough "Our Planet", or the movie "Murder Mystery" with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler.

He also pointed out that it was difficult to reiterate the success of the beginning of the year, when the group attracted 9.6 million new subscribers.

The slowdown has affected all countries but "a little more the areas in which we have increased prices," says the group.

Netflix, however, manages to exceed the symbolic threshold of 150 million subscribers in the world: it now has 151.56 million.

It hopes to get off to a good start in the third quarter and anticipates a total of 7 million new subscribers, including 800,000 in the United States and 6.1 million in the rest of the world, thanks to the launch of the new seasons of "Stranger Things", " Casa de Papel "," The Crown "and the last season of" Orange is the new black ".

He also relies on the exclusive launch of director Martin Scorsese's film "The Irishman" and the "6 Undergound" action movie directed by blockbuster Michael Bay.

On the finance side, the streaming giant saw its quarterly net profit fall by 29% to $ 271 million. Reported by share - reference in North America - the profit came out at 60 cents, slightly above expectations.

At 4.92 billion dollars, the turnover is slightly lower than market expectations (4.93 billion).

© 2019 AFP