Netflix loses close to 1 million subscribers, their biggest loss in 25-year history

Streaming service Netflix released its earnings report on Tuesday. Their earnings report showed a loss of 970,000 subscribers. This loss of subscribers represents their biggest drop in their 25-year history.

Netflix have said that the news isn’t all negative, both for the company and their investors. Netflix announced prior to the report being released, that they anticipated a loss of 2 million customers. This positivity was also reflected in Netflix’s share price. Netflix has seen their share price drop by 67% this year, however they did get a small bump when their share price increased by 8% after the results from their earnings report were announced.

“The stock is up because (analyst) downgrades all made a big deal out of slowing growth,” Michael Pachter, an analyst for Wedbush Securities, said of the small increase in the share price, per IB Times.

After their shares falling this year, Disney also had a share price increase of 1% after Netflix’s earnings report was released.

“Our excitement is tempered,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in an interview uploaded to YouTube after the earnings report was released.. “But looking forward, streaming is working everywhere. … We’re very bullish on streaming.”

Hastings pointed to new episodes of the science-fiction series “Stranger Things,” the most-watched English-language show in Netflix history, with helping to stave off more defections.

Netflix issued a letter to shareholders and  have pointed to password sharing, a strong pound losing subscribers abroad and an inconsistent economy as reasons to their viewers leaving them.

“Our challenge and opportunity is to accelerate our revenue and membership growth by continuing to improve our product, content and marketing as we’ve done for the last 25 years, and to better monetize our big audience,” the letter read.

Netflix went onto say that they would continue to focus solely on streaming and not any other avenues of income.

“This freedom means we can offer big movies direct to Netflix, without the need for extended or exclusive theatrical windows, and let members binge-watch TV if they want, without having to wait for a new episode to drop each week,” the company said, according to The New York Times. “This focus on choice and control for members influences all aspects of our strategy, creating what we believe to be a significant long-term business advantage.”

Netflix currently has just over 220 million subscribers worldwide.