Netflix reported a loss of 200,000 subscribers in its latest earnings report for Q1 2022. That included the loss of 700,000 subscribers they blocked from Russia.
Netflix is projecting a further loss of 2 million subscribers in Q2 2022. Its stock lost a quarter of its value.
Now that quarantines are lifted the number of people watching Netflix has fallen. They also cite problems with password sharing. 100 million accounts use password sharing.
Netflix also just raised its price, leading to some of the declines.
I’ve never had Netflix. Maybe the price will go down or they will do some promotions. In the past, Netflix never did promotions since they didn’t need to.
We’ve never had Netflix only have Amazon for postage, although now and again they do have something decent to watch. Its belt tightening time and something has to give, these streaming services will have to offer something above a rival to be kept.
Password sharing is encouraged within a household where different family members want to watch different things. But NF seem to have trouble controlling member who share with others outside the household. They know who these people are, but they are reluctant to charge them extra. One idea I heard about last night, is to force ads upon them.
I enjoy Netflix, but I really don’t know how it compares with other similar services. I don’t watch scheduled TV anymore, apart from a bit of news, and ms d00d likes a couple of primetime soaps. I want to binge on something whenever I’m in the mood.
I don’t think it’s surprising really. People able to get out and about more, so watching less, plus it’s a luxury so an easy thing to cut back on when finances get tight
I like Netflix and we watch it quite a lot so good value for us but if it goes, it goes. I’m not sure I’d pay more for it than we do at the moment
In a sign of the unease, one of America’s best known investors, William Ackman, ditched his $1.1bn investment in Netflix on Wednesday, taking a loss of more than $400m.
His hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management had bought the shares just three months ago.
In a brief statement, Mr Ackman said that while Netflix’s plans to change its business model made sense, investing in the company felt too risky.
“While Netflix’s business is fundamentally simple to understand, in light of recent events, we have lost confidence in our ability to predict the company’s future prospects with a sufficient degree of certainty,” he wrote.
To me, this is the problem. Their revenue grew despite the subscriber base falling because they increased their prices. But despite their revenue growth, their profits are still down. They’re spending more in the margin than their revenue growth in the margin. Even if they find a way to generate more revenue through cracking down on password sharing or ads, they still haven’t addressed why they’re spending so much money to be going backwards in profitability.
As more streaming services are competing and more exclusive contracts are being enforced, more people are going back to piracy to get their content.
There was a time when, if you had Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu, you were pretty much set. Now services like Paramount+ that took all the Star Trek content from all its competitors are making streaming services too expensive to find all the content people are looking for in one place and for a low enough price.
Someone did a visual of Netflix’ money flows. Netflix spends half as much in content production amortization as it did in content licensing for 2021.
