Netflix now plans to spend $8 billion to keep you glued on your couch

Netflix just keeps raising the ceiling on its content aspirations.

The company officially announced that it could spend up to $8 billion on original video in 2018—a cool billion dollars more than it had previously planned.

Ted Sarandos, head of content at Netflix, recently said publicly that the company could hit the $8 billion mark, but Monday's quarterly earnings report made it official.

"With $17 billion in content commitments over the next several years and a growing library of owned content ($2.5 billion net book value at the end of the quarter), we remain quite comfortable with our ability to please our members around the world. We’ll spend $7-8 billion on content (on a P&L basis) in 2018," Netflix wrote in its earnings release.

Netflix has that kind of cash to spend, and then some. The company continues to add millions of subscribers every quarter (it's now up to 104 million) and is also raising its prices.

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Netflix's spending on content should help retain its current subscribers and continue to add more—particularly outside the U.S., where Netflix still has the most upside for new customers.

But it's also to help remain competitive as other big companies start to tread on its turf. Netflix still has HBO and Hulu, while Amazon and even Apple and Facebook are jumping into the market.