Netflix’s market cap has plummeted from around $15 billion to around $4 billion in just three months.
The company that could do no wrong for a long time, now can’t seem to do anything right. It’s fascinating.
The odd thing is that not all that much has actually changed over that span. Instead, this seems to be mostly about perception and that’s badly hurting their outlook. The price changes were necessary, but Netflix mildly fucked up the handling of them. The spin-off of the DVD business was also a good idea for the long run, but Netflix badly fucked up the handling of it.
Those screw-ups led to some customer defections, but not all that many. But those side-by-side with the content standoff most of Hollywood now seems intent on waging with Netflix makes the future outlook uncertain at best (a fucking nightmare at worst).
Netflix is a great example of a scrappy company totally disrupting a business model and destroying an incumbent (Blockbuster). But it turns out that the reward for all that hard work was simply turning the Eye of Sauron on them. Now that Netflix is the incumbent, Hollywood is out to grab the money as they beat the shit of them to assert their command.
The content business is a bitch.
