In many countries, Netflix faces an uphill challenge. Well-established rivals have sprouted from France to India, often mimicking Netflix’s video-on-demand services while promoting local-language content for national audiences. Other media companies like Sky of Britain and Mediaset of Italy also have struck licensing deals with media companies like HBO to offer American programming for Europeans who crave the latest American shows.

And a number of deep-pocketed global tech companies like Amazon and Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant, as well as a flurry of new start-ups, now offer Netflix-like services, which could make it harder for the company to gain a foothold in new territories.

“Every market is growing,” Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive, said recently when asked by investors about the company’s aggressive international expansion plans. “But some are doing better than others,” he acknowledged. “That’s up to us to manage to get the total portfolio to be as fast growing as they are.” Netflix does not provide specific figures on individual countries worldwide.

People across the globe are taking advantage of new technological trends, including ultrafast broadband and affordable smartphones, to stream movies and television programs to their homes and, increasingly, to watch shows on the go.

Netflix, for instance, could roughly double its subscribers worldwide, to 130 million by the end of the decade, with the majority of viewers living outside the United States, according to Ampere Analysis, an independent video analytics firm. That figure would be about triple that of Amazon, its closest rival.

To fend off competitors, Netflix executives also are increasingly signing global licensing deals, often at a significant premium, with major studios providing Hollywood blockbusters across the company’s international markets all at once. Currently, content deals are made on a regional or national level.

And in a bid to win over skeptical international customers, many of whom have never heard of Netflix, the company has teamed up with national cellphone and cable operators to offer the video-streaming service as part of existing video-on-demand offerings. The company has similar agreements with companies like Cablevision and Dish Network in the United States.