Netflix hit hard times during the second quarter of this year with what’s being called a “dramatic slowdown” in their subscriber base:
CBS SAN FRAN – Netflix’s video streaming service suffered a dramatic slowdown in growth during its traditionally sluggish spring season, a drop-off coming as it girds for even stiffer competition.
The service picked up 2.7 million worldwide subscribers for the April-June period. That’s far below the 5 million subscribers forecast by Netflix. The second-quarter letdown announced Wednesday comes after Netflix attracted nearly 10 million subscribers during the first three months of the year , more than any other quarter since the debut of its video streaming service 12 years ago.
The Silicon Valley giant ended June with 151.6 million worldwide subscribers, far more than a current crop of video streaming rivals that includes as Amazon and Hulu.
Wow, they only picked half the subscribers they were expecting.
Here’s why they say the slowdown is happening:
But Netflix traced the second-quarter’s slow subscriber growth primarily to a recent round of prices increase, including hikes of 13% to 18% in its biggest market, in the U.S. That pushed the price of its most popular U.S. plan to $13 per month, testing the bounds of how much some consumers are willing to pay for a service that started out at $8 per month for the same level of service.
I’ve no doubt this is a big part of it because as soon as I heard about the price increase earlier this year, I cringed.
But I would also like to think – and they would probably never admit this – that Netflix suffered a huge loss in subscribers after they announced they were supporting the ACLU in a lawsuit against the state of Georgia over a their new pro-life law.
I certainly can’t prove this contributed, but I know Patrick Madrid encouraged all of his listeners multiple times to drop Netflix. And I’m sure that many others would have followed suit because abortion is such a huge issue to many people.
So I hope that’s really what burned their popcorn and maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll admit that it did.