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posted by
martyb
on Wednesday July 18 2018, @08:38AM
from the still-growing-but-not-[as]-fast-[enough] dept.
from the still-growing-but-not-[as]-fast-[enough] dept.
Netflix shares plunged by more than 14% in after-hours trade on Monday, after the firm reported disappointing subscriber growth.
Netflix said it added 5.2 million subscribers in the three months to the end of June, the same number it did during the period last year.
The streaming service had forecast growth of 6.2 million.
The decline in share price follows a successful run for the stock, which had roughly doubled so far this year.
Is the number of Netflix subscribers reaching a plateau based on its current library of titles, or are competitors eating into its growth?
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Netflix Shares Plunge as Subscriber Growth Rate Stalls
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I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday July 18 2018, @04:03PM
... bread and circuses?
Not entirely crazy. Yeah we know you don't make money, but we'll leave you alone in your financialization bubble scheme as long as you keep the propaganda pushing and the proles entertained...
Some of the numbers are bizarre if you rub multiple articles together against each other. Apparently total subs divided by total hours streamed daily is darn close to 1. If the average subscriber really does watch roughly sixty movies per year, thats roughly 120 hours of viewing movies out of 365 hours of viewing, such that a little subtraction shows the average viewer watched about 200 hours of TV. So... I tried starting several TV series, Sopranos, B5, a couple others, and just couldn't work up the motivation to put dozens of hours into them "until they get good", and the general impression is streaming subscribers binge watch lots of series, but at only 200 hours per year, the average sub binge watches maybe one series per year, it just doesn't work out mathematically otherwise.
Apparently there is no such thing as the one show that all netflix viewers watch. Per some clickbait I found in some google searches, "Stranger Things" is the second best show available on netflix and has clickbait story titles like "Is the most popular streaming show of all time" and so forth. HOWEVER only 8.8 million out of over a hundred million subs has watched it. Netflix does seem to be very much like legacy TV in that 95%+ of people do NOT watch any given show, although clickbait implies "everyone" watches some shows.
There is no cultural heritage in mass media anymore, which is just weird to think about for older people.
My wife's friend implied Netflix costs $14/month regardless how many people live in the house, so $168/yr for average 60 movies is $3/movie. Movie prices in theaters are all over the map, on "date night" with my wife its $14/person but my son is literally at a movie right now with a friend and during summer in inconvenient hours they charge a mere $3/person. Obviously you can watch a netflix movie anytime you want, but I was surprised that its possible to spend about the same amount of money at a theater or at home. Of course its usually cheaper at home, especially if you have many people over and don't pay $20 for a bucket of greasy popcorn.
Some more semi-subversive math... I subscribe to Amazon Prime because I need the free shipping, although with a mere 85 million of my friends. Needless to say, Prime give me free streaming and is roughly as popular as Netflix despite gaslighting that "everyone has netflix no one uses prime" and there's more crap on prime than I am interested in watching so I'd never subscribe to netflix. Anyway the point I'm trying to make is there's probably not a lot of overlap between netflix and prime subs because why would anyone waste the money on both? Leading to the top to streamers having roughly 200 million subs worldwide. Which has interesting implications, there's only 125 million households in the USA. Of course, there are, I'm sure, many international subs of both services.
As a side dish its hard to imagine why a household would have more than one netflix account, and google claims 58M netflix accounts in the USA, so there's no way netflix can grow a bit more than double, without forming more households in the USA. You can expect growth rates like 10x per quarter at a very small SV startup, but netflix is already so large it can never mathematically grow more than 2 times larger than it already is.
Interesting meta observation: We're in a full on bubble economy for a generation or two now. There's nothing any Americans as a group have in common, certainly not culture or anything OTHER than being in massive economic bubbles. What makes an American an American clearly isn't belief in the laws or constitution or any shared ethical / moral values or shared culture or shared religion or shared race... all that is still holding the country together as a unit is shared economic bubbles. What a strange dystopic "cyberpunk"-esque way to organize a civilization. The only way to recognize us from them is to see if they're also into housing or SV stock speculation.