Hollywood is breathing a collective sigh of relief — for now.
Netflix lost almost a million customers in three months time, and then warned Wall Street that the current financial quarter’s new signups will fall 800,000 short of expectations. It was the largest subscriber defection in the company’s history. And that was good news considering the streaming giant originally projected two million subscribers would dump the service.
Reed Hastings, the streamer’s co-chief executive, almost seemed embarrassed on the company’s quarterly analyst call that there was “excitement” at the “less bad results.” And stock traders turned nervously exuberant by lining up buy orders on Netflix that indicated an 8% pop ahead of Wednesday’s market open.