Shares of Netflix touched $349.29 this week, raising its stock market value to $153 billion, eclipsing Disney’s $152 billion and making the streaming service, briefly, the most valuable entertainment company in the world.
Netflix’s stock has been the top performer in the S&P 500 so far this year, surging nearly 70 percent since January. But a bullish forecast put out last Friday by Bank of America analyst Nat Schindler suggested the peak is yet to come, fueling this week’s rally.
“We believe Netflix still has a considerable opportunity ahead if it can achieve reasonable penetration levels internationally,” Schindler said in a note to clients. “Netflix will face varying levels of competition, regulation and economic conditions in each individual market it participates in, but its content scale should allow it to become the dominant streaming player in virtually all markets.”
Schindler predicts that Netflix’s global subscriber base can continue to grow by 8 percent annually, reaching 360 million by 2030, as consumers in a growing number of markets get access to broadband. Netflix currently pegs its global subscriber rolls at 125 million. Read More »
The story cited an anonymous source, who pointed to a paragraph in the press release announcing the deal, which reported that “Netflix-related billing will be handled directly by Comcast, giving customers one, simple monthly statement,” as evidence of Comcast’s arm-twisting. 
A big reason it hasn’t fallen apart until now is that programmers and operators shared in interest in keeping it together, even as they regularly clashed over carriage renewals. For programmers, bundling channels into a single carriage deal brings in incremental affiliate fees and increases advertising inventory; for operators, the big bundle helps sustain high ARPU rates and long-term subscriber contracts. Neither side had an incentive to fundamentally alter the structure of the business.
from $1.8 trillion in 2016 to $2.2 trillion in 2021, representing a compound annual growth rate of 4.2 percent– a ratcheting down from the 4.4 percent CAGR it forecast last year.
But while Hulu was rolling out, many traditional pay-TV providers were rolling over. According to 
Although the 5X increase in price is impressive — and was probably 
As with those other services, however, the lineup of channels in YouTube’s bundle is a bit of a hit and miss affair at this point. Subscribers will get all the major broadcast networks, along with ESPN, USA, Bravo, Fox News and MSNBC, but no CNN, Turner or TBS, and no Viacom-owned networks.
The question is, why bother? Neither AOL nor Yahoo is exactly dominant in its market today. In Yahoo’s case, it isn’t even clear what that market is. Even in 
Under the deal with the FCC, the merged company will be prohibited from imposing usage-based pricing or data caps on its 19.4 million broadband subscribers, a tactic many cable internet providers have turned to lately to discourage video cord-cutting by indirectly raising the cost of using OTT services like Netflix.
not networked to support much beyond overlaying some pre-baked interactive elements. Even today, when second-screen use while watching TV is a mainstream behavior, most of that activity involves something other than the content on the TV screen, or happens on unrelated social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook that are opaque to the broadcaster until after the fact. Dedicated second-screen apps allow for greater dialog between broadcaster and viewer but don’t really capture the broader conversation around the content.
The average number watched during a single binge, fact, is an astonishing five episodes, which in the case of a drama series could easily eat up four or five hours. Millennials in the survey average six episodes per sitting.
The announcement itself was no big surprise. AT&T obviously didn’t spend $48 billion to acquire DirecTV just to be in the satellite TV business — a business with little if any organic growth left in it — and extending DirecTV’s business onto broadband and wireless platforms is an obvious strategy. What is a bit surprising is the timing of the announcement.