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25 Jan 2012 21:32

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Biz: Netflix recovers subscribers in fourth business quarter

  • 651,000 new Netflix subscribers in their fourth  quarter, a nice recovery since last year’s Qwikster/price hike exodus
  • 800,000 subscribers they lost over that series of flaps and foibles — still some fence-mending to be done source

23 Dec 2011 14:11

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Biz: Reed Hastings punished financially for Netflix’s sucky year

  • $1.5 million chopped off his stock options in 2012 source
  • » Merry Christmas, screwup: The Netflix CEO, who oversaw a months-long decline in his company’s stock price in the wake of customer-angering moves, lost half of his stock options for next year — from $3 million to $1.5 million. The company will likely face its first net loss in more than a decade next year, due in part to lost subscribers.

25 Oct 2011 10:58

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Biz, Tech: Netflix’s stock, then and now: A steep, severe drop

  • $304.79 Netflix’s stock price on July 13, the day after they announced their unpopular price changes
  • $76 Netflix’s stock price as of this morning; it’s down more than 75 percent since July alone source
  • » How hard will moving forward be? During yesterday’s earning report, Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings explained off his company’s tough year like this: “We made a couple of big mistakes this year. It’s up to us to own up to those mistakes and to move forward.” But will owning up to those mistakes be enough to stop the bleeding amongst investors? A 75 percent drop in three months — when your stock is worth more than $300 — is just insane. It dropped 36 percent today alone. If you think Netflix is going to bounce back, though, now’s the time to buy their stock.

24 Oct 2011 19:48

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Biz, Tech: Netflix’s downward slide continues: Investors hate them even more now

  • 800,000 fewer folks give Netflix money source
  • » Oh, and it gets worse: The once-high-flying company now has 99 problems, and a shrinking stock price is one — one that dipped 26 percent in after-hours trading today. The company — which recently raised the cost of its legacy DVD plan, tried to split off DVDs into a separate site and then backed off after everyone hated it — also informed investors today that it would have a couple of unprofitable quarters as it expanded into the UK and Ireland. “We expect the costs of our entry into the UK and Ireland will push us to be unprofitable on a global basis; that is, domestic profits will not be large enough to both cover international investments and pay for global G&A and technology and development,” the company said. CEO Reed Hastings blamed the drop in subscribers on the price increase.

24 Sep 2011 12:33

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Tech: Dish Network’s Netflix killer has catch that limits its killing abilities

  • yeah … Dish Network’s new Netflix competitor — based around the recently-acquired Blockbuster brand — offers 100,000 DVDs by mail and 4,000 streaming films for $10 a month. Considering the current status of Netflix and Qwikster, the time is now.
  • … but You have to be a Dish Network subscriber to take advantage of this deal, which seems like a major mess-up on the part of Dish. (They are offering a deal to get it for free for a year, for new subscribers.) Timing is on your side, guys! Do something smart! source

19 Sep 2011 17:57

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Biz: Netflix sees shares drop on heels of unpopular Qwikster gamble

  • I have a feeling the apologies are just beginning. They’re catching customers off-guard by making huge changes and not providing a lot of explanation for them. It’s been handled poorly.
  • Mike Gordon, chief executive of the corporate PR firm “Gordon Group” • Issuing his dire analysis of the Netflix/Qwikster fracas, which we spent a bit of time on last night. Basically, the big picture for Netflix of late has not been promising — their price-hikes announced during the summer sparked a non-negligible exodus from their service, with about 1 million of their 25 million U.S. customers said “no thanks.” When the company was then forced to revise their cancellation figures for the worse last week, their share prices tumbled by 25%. Then, already playing pretty fast and loose with the strength of their company, came last night’s unexpected announcement. The result? Another 4% drop in share prices. Whatever your feelings about Netflix’s corporate strategy in a vacuum, it’s clear that with real customers they’ve fouled this up to a striking extent. source