Remember how everyone freaked out that Netflix was down over the weekend due to a power outage? There’s a good reason for that: Everyone was more hooked than usual last month. June was the video streaming service’s biggest month ever — they topped a billion viewing hours, according to CEO Reed Hastings, which in layman’s terms is a freaking lot. By those stats, every user watched Netflix streaming 80 minutes a day last month, according to one estimate. Viewing is poised to increase as Netflix’s original programming, including a new season of Arrested Development, expands. To put this in realistic terms, we tried to explain what a billion hours means in a way that everyone would understand: In Law & Order terms. Dun dun.
» Bonus: Criminal Intent! Because a reader asked below about “Law and Order: Criminal Intent,” we did the math on that, too. You could watch Vincent D’Onofrio’s meal ticket 7,029,382 times, if given a billion hours.
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 (via • follow)
Well, it did load slowly at first. But we got our boy Ken Marino being his ol’ douchey self, so we’ll take it. Is it working for you?
» The future for Netflix: The key fact to take from Netflix’s recent subscriber results? That comes from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: ”We are now a streaming company, which also offers DVD-by-mail,” he says. The company recently announced a streaming-only plan, which makes a lot of sense because that’s where much of their growth is.
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