Subscriber slump may be bad news for Netflix, but better for the planet

theguardian.com:

In the early 1930s, when Claud Cockburn worked on the Times, the subeditors had a competition to see who could compose the dullest headline. Cockburn claimed that he won with “Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead”. Alas, subsequent factcheckers have failed to unearth such a headline in the archives, but it came to mind last week when Netflix announced, in a quarterly earnings report, that for the first time in a decade it had lost subscribers – 200,000 of them, to be exact. In North America, it had lost 640,000 and suffered additional losses in every other region except for Asia-Pacific area, where it added a million.

This didn’t seem very interesting to this columnist, especially as it included the period when Netflix had pulled out of Russia, where it had 700,000 subscribers, which to my mind meant that the reported loss would have been a gain of half a million had Putin not invaded Ukraine.

Still, the negative 200,000 figure seemed to spook Wall Street. Netflix’s stock price collapsed by nearly 40% in two days, taking more than $50bn off the company’s market value in the blink of an eye. This was a shock because just over a month ago – on 8 March, to be precise – the company’s chief financial officer was telling a conference organised by Morgan Stanley that the company was on a growth track that “pretty quickly gets us to a business that’s over a half a billion members”. But now suddenly that rosy picture has faded; the outlook has turned pessimistic and Netflix is forecasting that it will lose another 2 million subscribers over the next three months.

So what happened? Why has a golden goose suddenly turned into a turkey? Possible explanations include the thought that maybe Netflix’s precipitous growth was a blip