Netflix News [Feb 12, 2023]
Netflix (NFLX) investors saw the stock closing -4.56% the last 5 days, which means it sits at +17.77% YTD.
Let's go through the news around Netflix this week together.
LEGEND: Positive News | Neutral News | Negative News
According to Neilson's December 2022 report for top streaming platforms, Netflix has lost it's top spot to YouTube.
YouTube is a platform that is more accessible (since it's free) so it doesn't surprise me much - but it is interesting to see how many other competitors are so far behind Netflix.
The streaming wars are sure to get hotter in 2023!
Jefferies conducted a survey on password sharing, and 62% said they would stop using Netflix if implemented.
If we dig deeper, this makes sense. The survey asked 380 people who currently don't pay for Netflix if they would pay, and naturally the answer is no (why pay when it's been free all this time?). But the reality is that once these measures are implemented by Netflix, some of them will come back to the platform, and these would be net new subscribers.
Even if all 380 customers (for example) don't sign up for a paid tier, it would not affect Netflix's financials since they weren't paying either way to begin with!
It's here - Netflix has begun rolling out password sharing prevention measures in 4 countries (Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain).
The changes will be forced on customers by the end of February, and they will have to pick a "primary location" which is what will determine if the service is being shared or not. They have also announced that if you'd like to share your account, it would cost $7.99 CAD (or the equivalent in the other 3 countries) per additional account, on top of your existing plan fee.
This means that this implementation is coming to the US very soon (the core customer base of Netflix), and it will be interesting to see in their Q1 2023 results what the impact of these changes were on their top and bottom lines.
RATING | PRICE TARGET | FIRM |
BUY | $425 | Jefferies |
We look forward to spending a few minutes with you next Sunday for some new Netflix news!
Disclosure: I am a Netflix (NFLX) shareholder at the time of publishing.