On does not talk enough about the benefits of carpooling. It was while driving to work together in the same car that Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph explored the idea of starting an online sales business. But of what ? In 1997, the first DVDs appeared, easier to send by post than video cassettes. Ten years later, Netflix celebrates with great fanfare the shipment of its billionth DVD.
Already a star of the Stock Exchange for its spectacular growth, the company launched, in the same year 2007, a video on demand service on the Internet. Sixteen years later, the firm announces that in September 2023, the last DVD will be sent to the last customer. In the meantime, it has become the undisputed leader in online video viewing, streaming. Such is the cycle of technology, which condemns its actors to reinvent themselves every ten years to continue to attract investors, to grow even more, or die. Blockbuster, the king of DVD rentals and main competitor to Netflix, filed for bankruptcy in 2010.
The valuation has collapsed
This is why Wall Street, which brought the value of Netflix to the pinnacle, to more than 300 billion dollars (273.6 billion euros) during the confinement of 2020, is getting impatient. Where is the revival? Faced with the onslaught of competitors Disney, Apple or Amazon, Netflix lost, for the first time, 1 million customers in the United States, in 2022. As a result, the company’s valuation collapsed by half. And it’s not over. The first quarter results, published on Tuesday April 18, show that the company is still progressing in Asia (1.46 million more subscribers), but only very marginally in America. Netflix is regaining subscribers, but not really growth.
“We should no longer look at ourselves only on the criterion of the number of subscribers, but on the classic indicators of sales and profits”, the company said. She argues that she is making a lot of money, $1.3 billion in profit in the first quarter alone, and that she is counting on her campaign to fight fraud, with the development of shared subscriptions, and on the introduction of advertising, to continue to grow.
But it’s a different story, far more boring than the boom-and-bust story that excites investors and justifies that Netflix is still worth 15 times more than News Corp, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Like Apple, to maintain its rank, Netflix is condemned to permanent reinvention.