Netflix reported earnings tonight and I've been refreshing my browser like that's going to change anything about the numbers. They came out after the bell, and honestly? They're good. Like, actually good, not "good, considering" good.
2.05 million new US streaming subscribers added in the fourth quarter alone. That puts total US streaming subscribers at 27.15 million, and if you throw in the international side, the UK, Ireland, the Nordic countries they launched in back in October, the worldwide streaming total is past 33 million now. Thirty three million people paying $7.99 a month to watch stuff on their TVs and laptops instead of just leaving cable on in the background. That's not a rounding error anymore.
I bring this up because I was one of the people who basically wrote Netflix off back in the fall of 2011. Remember Qwikster? The plan to split the DVD business and the streaming business into two separate companies with two separate websites and two separate bills? I remember sitting at my kitchen table reading that announcement and thinking these people have genuinely lost the plot. My roommate at the time cancelled her subscription out of pure spite within the week. The stock cratered from somewhere around $300 a share down into the $50s by the time the dust settled. Everybody wrote the "is this the end of Netflix" post that fall, myself probably included somewhere in this blog's archive, though I'm not going to go dig it up. It's embarrassing.
And yet here we are, fifteen months later, and the thing that saved them wasn't some clever pivot. It was just content. They kept licensing more shows, kept expanding into new countries, and started making their own stuff instead of only renting other people's. House of Cards premieres next week, all thirteen episodes released at once instead of one a week, which is still a genuinely strange bet that nobody else in the industry has tried at this scale. I have no idea if dumping a whole prestige drama on people at once is going to work as a business model. I'll admit I'm curious enough that I've already cleared my Friday night for it.
What actually gets me about tonight's numbers isn't the subscriber count, it's the timing. Two years ago this looked like a company about to get eaten alive, cable companies were threatening bandwidth caps, content owners were pulling shows to go build their own competing services. Instead Netflix just kept adding subscribers every single quarter, through the DVD split, through the price changes people hated, through all of it. My mom, for what it's worth, still has the DVD plan. Still gets the red envelopes in the mail every week. No amount of me explaining streaming to her over Thanksgiving dinner has budged that even slightly. I think she just likes having something physical to mail back.
Wall Street will do whatever Wall Street does with the stock tomorrow morning, that's not really my department and I've learned not to guess. But as somebody who's had a streaming account since close to the beginning, and who sat through the ugly Qwikster years complaining about it the whole time, it's satisfying watching a company that looked like a punchline in 2011 turn back into the thing people are going to write business school case studies about. I don't know yet if House of Cards is actually going to be good. I do know I'm going to watch the whole thing in one sitting like everyone else is clearly planning to, and then pretend on Monday that I paced myself.