But even some top executives inside Netflix believe its big-budget movies should play for a while in theaters, and big shows should drop episodes weekly rather than all at once. It’s as if the coolest name in entertainment were now on par with those music industry squares suing Napster 20 years ago.

Hastings’ wagon is already hitched to decidedly legacy endeavors like advertising and cracking down on free sharing. In fact, the stock market-the geniuses that gave Netflix its ridiculous valuation in the first place-now seems to want both subs and revenue growth, and most observers see Netflix as needing to act more like its “legacy” rivals, not less. Yes, that’s been the Netflix line for a decade now, but it no longer rings true.

This freedom means we can offer big movies direct-to-Netflix, without the need for extended or exclusive theatrical windows.” “We’re unencumbered by legacy revenue streams. As did this comment from the shareholder letter: Trashing competitors by predicting “the end of linear TV over the next 5, 10 years” isn’t just wrong-the N.F.L., which is signed to the broadcast networks through 2033, might like a word with Reed-it feels defensive. But its rocket-ship trajectory and $200 billion in market value have gone poof, meaning it’s basically a- gasp-legacy media enterprise that, at least for the foreseeable future, must operate in many ways like the media peers it disrupted, whether Hastings will say that publicly or not.Īnd, for some reason, he’s still sticking to that disruptor narrative. Profitable, yes, with great content, a commitment to working with the best artists, and an amazing 220 million subscribers to consume it all. Yay Netflix, boo Netflix it’s hard not to feel like this is all just a slight variation on the same theme: Netflix is now a slow-growth company. So… maybe the champagne should be Mumm’s instead. OK… great? A projection of 1 million subs added next quarter? That would reverse six months of losses and restart the Netflix growth machine- put the Dom on ice, right? Yet that’s nowhere near pre-2022 projections, and it’s a fraction of the growth rate of rival streaming services.

Reed Hastings’s words, than the Netflix-created benchmark of minus 2 million. Down 970,000 subs last quarter-“less bad,” in co-C.E.O. But the people who actually make the Netflix content seemed, from my admittedly small sample, to be a bit numb to the hoopla. Wall Street and the media might have whipped up the Tuesday earnings report as a referendum on the entire entertainment industry, the most important data drop in the history of streaming. It’s funny, talking to a few people at Netflix this week-both before and after the Big Reveal-there was a sense of indifference about the subscriber numbers.

How to rip netflix