A doubling in subscribers might need a trippling in customer service agents (especially if the new customers are not as good at tech and need more help, which goes along with being a late adopter or if the service quality drops because of the presumed doubled usage, and there's more service requests as a result).
If the doubled subscribers requires doubling the number of Netflix OpenConnect CDN boxes, that would mean current capex, and while the additional revenue might eventually pay for it, there might need to be borrowing costs to get the equipment sooner rather than later. Also, right now is a tricky time to get lots more hardware, so a 2021 node might cost more than a 2020 node, even if they have the same capacity.
All that said, without looking at their investor reports, I suspect they have some margin and cash on hand to make things work and mostly profit. They probably also have a target for spare CDN node capacity, because there's some pretty high variability of peak load on new releases and ISP install lead time can be super long. Also, they do a lot of efficiency work to make sure they can push as much traffic as possible from their nodes.
If the doubled subscribers requires doubling the number of Netflix OpenConnect CDN boxes, that would mean current capex, and while the additional revenue might eventually pay for it, there might need to be borrowing costs to get the equipment sooner rather than later. Also, right now is a tricky time to get lots more hardware, so a 2021 node might cost more than a 2020 node, even if they have the same capacity.
All that said, without looking at their investor reports, I suspect they have some margin and cash on hand to make things work and mostly profit. They probably also have a target for spare CDN node capacity, because there's some pretty high variability of peak load on new releases and ISP install lead time can be super long. Also, they do a lot of efficiency work to make sure they can push as much traffic as possible from their nodes.