THB #156: There Are No Streaming Wars (again)

I didn’t expect to be writing this today, but I listened to Michael Nathanson trying to get past Matt Belloni’s myopia about the industry and I wanted to reassert some points.

Nathanson talked about Disney resetting the subscriber count expectations openly in order to reposition in a better way moving forward. Huzzah!

This was, as I have written in the past, one of the biggest problems with Netflix’s remarkable stock market success… golden handcuffs. Things changed, but Netflix wasn’t really free to adjust as it might because they were feeding that crazy stock price. Of course, that problem has been flipped on its back now and anything they do that makes sense looks like an act of desperation. Sucks.

This remains true for Netflix… an ad-based offering will expand the number of domestic subs, lower Average Revenue Per Unit, and perhaps, lower the entire revenue number for US/Canada. Good or bad?

And ad-based offering overseas will be a boon for subs across the globe, but how will it eff…