Netflix doing well now, is that good?

Netflix is doing well under the current circumstances, but people mostly watch the work of the 1% (Hollywood films and famous TV shows).

Rarely anyone on forums has any commercial success like that.

Any increased work for people here will depend on location, type of work, and how the stars align in their universe.
 
I would argue a lot of viewers these days go to Netflix to get away from Hollywood blockbusters and TV shows. TV is already saturated with those and for free. People want to see new, "original" content. Something that reflects a certain demographic, a certain culture ( Viki for example, has mostly asian content, and most people subscribe to it because of it's huge choice of Korean movies and TV series ). In Australia we have "Stan" now featuring a couple of locally made series which have had some success with local audiences. So this has created a new market for "alternative" content... things you can't see on TV or buy on DVD, featuring actors you've probably never heard of. Budgets for these productions are usually big enough to pay for a proper crew ( without going over the top )... so that's where opportunities may arise. As the TV market shrinks, the Netflix market expands...
 
Had to take a quick look at the birth certificate to make sure but it turns out "Papert" is still correct!

It might have saved me years of having to spell it out phonetically if it had double P's, but that's life. Good news is that it is a rare enough surname that as far as I know, I am still the only Charles Papert alive today.
 
CharlesPapert said:
Had to take a quick look at the birth certificate to make sure but it turns out "Papert" is still correct!

It might have saved me years of having to spell it out phonetically if it had double P's, but that's life. Good news is that it is a rare enough surname that as far as I know, I am still the only Charles Papert alive today.
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Being unique in whatever fashion is usually a good thing in this business. My name on the other hand, while not quite as pedestrian as say ‘John Smith’, well I’ll just say there are a bunch of us and we have some of the same clients. I’ve been paid for other guys work(at least twice from two different clients), received someone’s else’s travel(same guy multiple times), had my travel screwed up, because they thought I was another guy(same guy previously), and been called many times thinking I was one of the others(we’re all in different parts of the country). The worst one though was the phone call I received about 8:00 one morning from a producer while I was dead asleep asking where I was. What?! Did I forget I had a shoot?! Nope. Wrong “me”... I’m pretty sure I stayed up the rest of the morning after that. No coffee required.
 
Netflix may be doing well, but so are other online services, my youtube channel is growing faster than I expected in the last months.
 
Yea, I thought that when Amazon was a 30. For some reason, PE ratios don't mean anything anymore. Look at Tesla and Uber. Tesla has an Earnings Per Share of a negative $5/share and it's stock price is near 700. I guess the market is one big Ponzi scheme. I've wondered about Netflix. It's a game of musical chairs. Right now, Netflix' financials are ok. They only have 170 million subscribers. It's anybody's guess what the actual global market could be, but it's certainly much more than that. So you ride on the Netflix train and get off as market penetration reaches about 85%. The trick is knowing what 85% is.

Another thing to consider is that they have nothing unique and they are not diversified. They got their first. But plenty of competition is on the way to take market share. As Disney and the others pump up their offerings, Netflix has nothing to fall back on.

Unless Netfix spreads out into other products/ services, it will tank one day. But it seems to be a ways away. But I wouldn't put my retirement money on Netflix.
 
I think Netflix will be okay so long as they keep producing their own high quality content. It's a subscription business, which has the advantage of that they can always gauge how much money to spend based on how many current subscribers they already have. It's not like the movie business, where you incur a negative cost and hope enough people buy tickets and dvd's to turn a profit. Netflix subscribers have already paid their tickets, so it can always spend just enough to stay in profit. I don't believe their subscribers will dry up any time soon, as they also have an advantage over Disney and other services in that they have a more diverse slate. I cancelled Disney after watching The Mandalorian, as they mostly had kiddie fare on there.
 
The problem with shorting the markets is that one needs timing. Ask Prudent Bear. They had the best market analysis in the late 1990's (tech bubble, Y2K) and the mid-2000's (the "sub-prime explosion) but couldn't time the downturn (I'd have pegged it at six months after the Fed rate went back up).

Now what indicator would one use on Netflix? The subscriber count curve flattening? Minutes streamed? Competition subscriber count? No one knows what the market would bear. Someone wrote somewhere that your average streaming subscriber will pay for ~ 3.75 different offerings. I'd say conservatively that that average subscriber will tap out at $50/mo. Once it starts nearing that level, there's going to be a lot of settling in. So, wait until the US subscriber count total hits ~ 400 million and only then make your move.

In other ways, Netflix strategy is pretty sound - create a gigantic enough library, so once everyone sees everything that was ever made, they'll have Netflix as their sole mandatory keeper, with others being in a "one year in - two years out" rotation. But try predicting markets long term. Rosneft's head (and Putin's bag man ... literally) Igor Sechin infamously predicted a $200 barrel of oil. Now, it's $200 less than that.
 
DLD said:
The problem with shorting the markets is that one needs timing. ...
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I had some great fortune in timing for both the dot-com bust and the 2008 bust. In both cases, I went to cash before the crash. In the case of the dot-com bust, I was sure it was coming and got out 2 months before it started crashing. In the case of 2008, it was just luck. I knew it had to bust, but my timing was luck.

DLD said:
Now what indicator would one use on Netflix? ....
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I'd use what I said in my last post; subscriber growth. As soon as that shows a hint of slowing down, the price will tank. The US growth has already played out. Netflix stock price is living off global subscriber growth. Statista analysts think the streaming growth is already approaching the peak, but their forecast shows it flattening out in 2023. I don't trust forecasts like this. The problem with Netflix subscription growth is that it is very seasonal. It grows all winter long at a fast clip and then tanks in the spring. So you have to wait a full year to have any idea how their growth is performing. There's no way to use US data to predict how the other markets will perform.

The data isn't there for me. I wouldn't hazard a guess.
 
Subscriber growth alone won't be enough. Netflix can clearly add to their bottom line by lowering their investment in content. They're spending around $15B/Y on it. At some point, they're going to reign it in and and become a cash cow.

Plus, there are other business models on the table - from sharing production expenses with other studios to inserting paid advertising, etc.

On the streamers budgets - https://observer.com/2019/10/netflix-disney-apple-amazon-hbo-max-peacock-content-budgets/

PS. For reference, Hollywood spends about $8B on its theatrical releases. Adding the numbers quoted above, the streamers will invest ~ $35B and there are more of them to come.
 
Paul F said:
Another thing to consider is that they have nothing unique and they are not diversified. They got their first. But plenty of competition is on the way to take market share. As Disney and the others pump up their offerings, Netflix has nothing to fall back on.

Unless Netfix spreads out into other products/ services, it will tank one day. But it seems to be a ways away. But I wouldn't put my retirement money on Netflix.
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Netflix is great for their 'Originals', (other)TV series(becoming hit or miss) and docs, but it's completely hit or miss with movies(mostly miss). I'd say 75%-85% or more of the time when I go to search for a movie title that I want to see, it's not available. I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, AppleTV+(currently free) and Disney+(currently free) and I still had to fork out $4 this weekend to watch a ~4 year old movie that wasn't available included with any of the four subscription streaming services I already have. These two thing are what's going to eventually rub people the wrong way: Having to have multiple services to "get everything" and STILL having to pay for certain things, because you still can't "get everything" even with multiple platforms.
 
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