The past year hasn’t been the best for Netflix. After making several strategic blunders, including one of the most painful branding disasters in recent memory, the company lost subscribers and saw and investors dump its shares.
But mistakes behind it, Netflix is pushing forward and in June, the company achieved a significant milestone: its subscribers watched more than 1bn hours of video.
If you ran a cable company facing the very real phenomenon of cord-cutting and you’re approached about a partnership by one of the companies that has arguably done more to spur cord-cutting than any other, what would you say?
If you’re Comcast, the answer is simple: ‘take a hike.’ And according to the New York Times, that’s precisely what it has told Netflix.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings probably won’t win a CEO of the Year award for his efforts in 2011.
After all, he was largely responsible for one of the biggest strategic and branding disasters of the year when he jumped the gun on trying to move his company away from delivering DVDs by mail and focusing on streaming instead.
As we’ve seen time and time again, even the highest-flying companies can be thrust into crisis and controversy in an instant for a variety of reasons.
For BP, it was a massive oil spill. For AirBnB, it was an ugly incident involving theft and vandalism.
And for Netflix, which is in the midst of a crisis today, the cause of its problems was a decision to change its business model.