Netflix has moved their earnings call from the 23rd to the 18th, and Davis suspects something is up. Given their new director of Internet TV, one possibility is that Netflix will acquire Roku to jumpstart a media extender business. Or perhaps there’s been an offer to buy Netflix. We suppose it’s also possible, though unlikely, that Netflix has some bad news to share. Or maybe there’s nothing significant here at all.
So what’s going on? You’ve got about 8 hours to get your vote in.
Probably nothing, maybe a partnership with Roku or some other HW vendor.
Looks like nothing but a bit of bad news: “Netflix said it expected second-quarter profit of 18 cents to 24 cents per share. Analysts on average were expecting 29 cents, according to Reuters Estimates.”
I can’t believe Netflix made me wake up early this morning just to hear them report weak results. On the call, they didn’t even reference why they had to reschedule the call, but the only real piece of news that leaked out was that they authorized a $100 million stock buyback, but doesn’t seem like a good reason to reschedule the call. So much for my dreams of a living room partnership announcement. Reed Hastings even went as far as to distance himself from the chatter that Netflix might hook up with the Xbox 360.
As I thought, the New Director of Internet TV is a desperation move.
Why doesn’t Netflix just revive the partnership with Tivo. The infrastructure is there. The second shoe will drop when online distribution direct to the TV gains traction…. and if Blockbuster teams up with Tivo.
Hacking Netflix wrote that during the Q&A they mentioned an Internet TV box of some sort is slated for 2008.
Petey – Yep. You know how effective it is?
I literally had not rented a movie since 1998, in *any* form, until a month or so ago. During that period I did *buy* over 1,000 DVDs, but that was nearly all anime – and I collect that. But I let a lot of movies pass me by during that time.
Since then I’ve rented a few movies – via TiVo and Amazon Unbox. I finally watched “Thank You For Smoking”, which I managed to miss in theaters. It wasn’t all high art – I also rented ‘Beerfest’ since I liked Super Troopers and I figured for $3, why not? ;-) But that’s it – with the convenience of my TiVo, and having the movie in a couple of hours, instead of days, impulse works. Why not indeed!
I’d love to see TiVo get more content – either through the likes of Blockbuster or NetFlix, or companies like Movielink and Akimbo.
I still think it was a mistake to release the S2DT without an MPEG-4/VC-1 decoder. That would’ve elevated the common platform to the S3 level for decoders, and MPEG-4 is the dominant distribution format, with VC-1(WMV) second – Unbox is normally VC-1. So TiVo needs to get content providers to re-encode content into MPEG-2 just for the Series2 boxes. And continuing to sell boxes with that limitation just prolongs the pain. Sure, there will be legacy S2 boxes out there for years – but the S2DT just shifts the ripping point to the right.
I agree about the problem with mpeg-2 reliance.
I second the idea of reviving the partnership with TiVo. It seems like they are already at least part of the way there and they could probably make it happen pretty quickly. It would be amazing to be able to pick a movie to rent and have it on you TiVo available to watch within a couple of hours.