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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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Savage's Law of Expediency:
You want it bad, you'll get it bad.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 18 2018, @03:56PM (2 children)
How much do advantage do competitors like Disney and HBO have over Netflix, though? They have old catalogues of content, but older viewers have already seen all that stuff a million times in scores of ways. Newer viewers have never heard of that stuff and don't care. It's the new hotness people care about, and if Netflix is producing more of that, faster, and winning the awards to prove it's just as good as any other producers', then they will still win the race.
Netflix has been burning cash with experimental original content. That part is true. On the other hand, they have analytics like no other content company ever before, or even still, so they know exactly how many people watch a new bit of content, exactly when during a show people stop watching, exactly what sorts of moments customer A tends to abandon an episode or series, and so on. Because of all that they have a much, much greater finger on the pulse of today's content consumer than practically any other player out there, with the possible exception of Google.
That, I would argue, gives them a huge competitive advantage. If they press that advantage and lure away all the top talent in the creative community, as they have been, then even companies like Disney will have a tall mountain to climb before they can knock off the king of the hill.
To do that, I suspect that a new player would have to invent a new way of interacting with content, the way that Netflix invented binge-watching. Perhaps interactive content could do it, but that's an entirely different way of thinking that would probably be better suited to a Dungeon Master than a traditional producer.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by oldmac31310 on Thursday July 19 2018, @02:15PM (1 child)
Netflix did not invent binge watching. Where did you get that silly notion?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 19 2018, @02:25PM
They did invent it in its current form, as in, very easy. Before you had to buy DVD box sets or get boxes and boxes of VHS to do it, and then you had to get up and manually switch out the media. Before those, sometimes they ran marathons on TV like for James Bond movies, but they'd take 18 times longer to watch than the runtime of the actual show because of all the commercial breaks they interlarded it with.
But laying on your sofa, letting the streamed episodes automatically roll over, one to another to another, is definitely a Netflix innovation.
Washington DC delenda est.