Netflix said Monday it added some five million new subscribers over the past three months as profits doubled, in a quarterly update that sent shares of the streaming video giant higher.
California-based Netflix ended the third quarter with more than 104 million paid subscribers, with international memberships hitting 52.7 million and overtaking the number of US subscribers.
Net profits meanwhile jumped to $129 million, more than double the figure from the same period a year ago for the video giant known for "House of Cards," "The Crown" and other original shows that are part of its library.
Revenues in the quarter rose 30 percent from a year ago to $2.98 billion, Netflix said.
"We are growing nicely across the world and are on track to exceed $11 billion in revenue in 2017," a letter to shareholders said.
Streaming has entered its profit-maximization period. For audiences, has the bliss point already been passed?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday October 24 2017, @02:09PM (2 children)
You're conflating two different things.
I don't need a high speed internet to read information. But I am willing to pay my ISP to build out its infrastructure in order to watch Netflix, Prime, HBO, Starz, Hulu, YouTube, all of which (except YouTube) that I subscribe to BTW. But this is veering into the net neutrality subject and big ISPs wanting to extort Netflix to pay them for my end of the connection.
So I am using "entertainment" "sites". But not some major newspapers for example. Other than YouTube (which I mostly watch on my living room TV), I don't use a web browser (except YouTube) to watch video -- which is the biggest bandwidth user.
The university only internet is a red herring. Obviously I don't want that. But that has nothing to do with advertising. I pay for my ISP. I pay for sites I like. I won't go to ad sites if my adblocker doesn't work. What's the problem you are trying to create? If ad sites want to block my ad blocker that is their decision. And I am free to decide not to come back. I don't see a problem here.
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday October 25 2017, @09:02PM (1 child)
You do when the information includes photographs or instructional videos.
So what do you do when you see a summary of an article, where the summary is on one of the "sites [you] like", but the full article isn't? For example, a subscriber to SoylentNews might see a link to an article on WSJ, which is not included in a subscription to SoylentNews. Do you start another subscription to the site hosting the full article?
The problem is that "ad sites if my adblocker doesn't work" is likely to grow soon to encompass a large fraction of the web, such that sites that require a separate subscription and/or require cross-site tracking make up at least six of the first ten results from a web search for a particular query.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday October 26 2017, @01:02PM
This is increasingly common. Most of the time, the article is not something important enough to unblock the ads -- which definitely means it is not important enough to subscribe to.
I'll live. I lived decades of my life before the web, before smart phones. I was happy and productive. I spent eight years of the 1980's not watching any TV -- none, zero. Starting in '89, I heard of various TV shows on Usenet that I had never seen. In the '90's my spouse wanted TV, and I saw more references to "old" '80's TV shows that I had never watched.
I strongly suspect if what you say is true, then there will be a growth of free sites. Sort of like how Open Source was the antidote to the stranglehold of the Microsoft monopoly in the 80's and 90's. At the time, it seemed like the stranglehold would never be broken. But in the open source world you could always see continuous steady progress.
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.