Citi Analysts Says Apple May Acquire Netflix

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by Vidiot, Jan 1, 2018.

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  1. The Panda

    The Panda Forum Mutant

    Location:
    Marple, PA, USA
    yep, in this atmosphere, they'd be foolish NOT to look into this. Again, not that I agree with this, but I can totally see them drooling for Netflix.
     
  2. Avenging Robot

    Avenging Robot Senior Member

    Apple TV is not performing as expected and apparently Netflix is running an enormous amount of debt in getting talent and making original programming. I think this is a definite possibility.
     
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  3. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member

    Location:
    USA
    That reminds me that Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million back in the day but the CEO famously turned it down...

    Blockbuster's CEO once passed up a chance to buy Netflix for only $50 million
     
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  4. vince

    vince Stan Ricker's son-in-law

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  5. Roland Stone

    Roland Stone Offending Member

    Blockbuster's mail rental with the option of store return was actually working and Netflix knew it. But somehow Blockbuster didn't know.
     
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  6. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member

    Location:
    USA
    That was one advantage Blockbuster had (then again, with Netflix you could return a disc just by walking down to your own mailbox) but by that point they were just hemorrhaging money and they were pretty much doomed. Too little, too late.
     
  7. SquishySounds

    SquishySounds Yo mama so fat Thanos had to snap twice.

    Location:
    New York
    They could buy Ford, GM, Chrysler, Harley-Davidson, Nissan, and Tesla with cash and still have over $100B just sitting around.
     
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  8. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

  9. Exit Flagger

    Exit Flagger Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York
    I would prefer Apple spent some time fixing all the problems in MacOS than buying Netflix.

    This story reminds me of the perennial prediction by Gene Munster who said for about five years straight that Apple was going to build an Apple branded television set. Never happened.

    Actually, just now I see he is making more ridiculous predictions: Amazon will buy Target this year.

    Amazon Will Buy Target This Year, Gene Munster Predicts
     
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  10. Deesky

    Deesky Forum Resident

    They're running a debt because they're reinvesting in growing the business, much like Amazon did and Tesla is. As long as their subscriber base continues to grow and investors see the growth and the returns, they will be happy and won't be too susceptible to a takeover (unless a totally crazy offer is made worth several times the company's projected valuation).
     
  11. Mirrorblade.1

    Mirrorblade.1 Forum Resident

    I think apple is something from the 20 century..
    And like most things from that era it dies off and or goes away..
     
  12. Avenging Robot

    Avenging Robot Senior Member

    Agreed, however the number I read was Netflix was in debt to the tune of 20 billion USD. I’m not sure if that can be counted as a sustainable debt load.
     
  13. Deesky

    Deesky Forum Resident

    I'm not sure what their long term debt is right now, but their business strategy has been very successful. The fundamentals only matter when the market loses confidence in a stock. This not the case with NFLX.

    Netflix stock closed 2017 at $192, which was up 55% year to date and in bull market territory ( 55% above its 52 week low of $124 set on 3 Jan 2017).

    Of course, things could change going forward with more streaming competition, especially from Disney and Amazon, etc. However, I don't think increased competition will seriously dent Netflix's subscriber base, as there is room for at least a handful of big players to coexist, offering different content.
     
  14. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Who predicted that Amazon would buy Whole Foods? In retrospect it makes a lot of sense, there is an almost 100% overlap between Amazon Prime members and Whole Foods customers. If there's a discount store frequented by Amazon members it's going to be Target, rather than Walmart. Personally I thought Amazon would buy Barnes & Noble, just to give them physical locations.
     
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  15. I ho[e not. Once again we're really paying for it but don't get to own it. All of these consolidations are bad for jobs, competition and, frankly, the world.
     
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  16. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Many pointed out the historical legacy of building a huge corporate headquarters, that it's the last step before a decline.

    I have a few Apple products, but all of them were bought used, mostly because I have to support clients with them. I have no love for the company.
     
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  17. From the very first moment I saw Rollerball I thought this is sadly where we are heading.
     
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  18. eddiel

    eddiel Senior Member

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    I remember that era. I was working in film distribution at the time and we were all sitting around asking why Blockbuster wasn't moving in that direction. Not necessarily buying Netflix but the business model in general seemed the way to go.
     
  19. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Apple's been in the music and video retailing business for over a decade now, haven't they? This is hardly some bizarre new avenue for them - if anything, it's a desperate attempt to play catchup in a field they once dominated.
     
  20. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Target, not WalMart - @Chris DeVoe beat me to it.
     
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  21. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    It's garbage on the Macs, too.

    This is partly a legacy of Apple using iTunes to manage everything about their portable devices, instead of producing a separate application or applications. They essentially turned iTunes into the iDevice Manager that also just happens to try to handle huge music and video libraries...poorly. In fact, it manages their devices poorly as well. It needs to be broken up into at least two different programs, possibly more.

    The problem is, Apple does software development in a very strange fashion. A lot of their software is written by comparatively tiny teams from what I've read, far smaller than the teams you'd find at places like Microsoft working on similar programs. This has some advantages when it comes to maintaining a stable code base and patching and tacking on a few new features, but when it comes time to seriously rewrite or remodel a sprawling application like this, it makes it nearly impossible.

    Even with large teams, giant old applications eventually collapse under their own weight - that's why Microsoft abandoned Internet Exploder for their new Edge browser.
     
  22. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I think they were trying to apply their appliance model to the pro market, thinking that hardware customization - at least inside the box - was a thing of the past, and that anybody who needed that level of customization could do it with some external solution. I think the problem is, that adds considerable expense to the upgrades, not to mention the tangle of cables that would snake out of a small device like the current Pro to connect it to external expansions. I think they also got caught by the slowdown in CPU development on the part of Intel, which hasn't pumped out improvements to the kind of chips needed to fit in the tiny Pro at the pace Apple probably expected. They're lagging far behind Windows boxes as a result.

    That kind of plug & play external expansion architecture has been the dream of the PC industry since the late '70s at least - Regan Chang at Atari was doing industrial designs around this circa 1980 for their line of 8-bit computers - but it's never really worked out in practice. It's always remained just far more practical to have a big box with slots as the main unit - the giant case, motherboard and card connectors simply don't add all that much to the overall cost of a mid to high-end machine - maybe 5%-10%, since most of the money still goes into the CPU, RAM and drives even to this day. And the convenience of having all of that room for expansion inside the main box still can't be beat, even in this era of blazingly fast cable based interfaces.

    Maybe in another 35 years it'll become practical.

    However, Apple has said they haven't abandoned the Pro market, and that their next machine will rectify these issues. We shall see. I almost think it's too late for them to regain trust with that market, although on the other hand if they focused their considerable design talents on it, they could take a pretty commanding bite out of it. The problem is, it's a small market in the grand scheme of things, and one that requires a ton of support. On the other hand, that's a great way to keep the company on the bleeding edge of development and to keep your customer service staff sharp. A hassle, but maybe a necessary exercise. After all, that's where their current cash cow ultimately came from - iOS is derived from their legacy computer business. If they'd abandoned that in favor of their iPod business 15 years ago...
     
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  23. goodiesguy

    goodiesguy Confide In Me

    Location:
    New Zealand
    Yep, I just run Wine and run Foobar2000 on my Macbook. It's not the easiest solution (no drag & drop compatibility for adding new files to playlist) but it's a hell of a lot better than going near iTunes.
     
  24. E.Baba

    E.Baba Forum Resident

    ........Apple then slows the shows to make them last longer.
     
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  25. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    When Craig Federighi of Apple met with a handful of tech journalists to acknowledge how they screwed up, the main issue seemed to be temperature. The Pro is a triangular heat pipe, with a main processor on one face, and dual GPUs on the other two faces. They made the bet that dual or quad GPUs were going to be the wave of the future, but that GPU makers actually went in the direction of making faster single GPUs. They couldn't put a single faster one on one side of the triangle, so the whole design of the Pro is a technological dead end.

    I know! I still have an Amiga 1000. The 2000 was a much more practical form factor and the Video Toaster would have never happened if they hadn't moved in that direction.

    It seems like the sort of things designers like and engineers hate. Like making set top boxes not in the shape of boxes. Like the Sling TV, seemingly designed for one purpose - winning awards for the design team.

    Rectangles may be dull, but they are practical.

    All the Mac pundits I follow just want the "cheese grater" back - a good looking big rectangular box with slots. When people like Andy Inhatko are buying Windows 10 machines, Apple should be worried.

    Interestingly, one of the pundits pointed out that she has to deal with three different interfaces MacOS, iOS on her iPad Pro, and a completely different one on her iPhone 10.
     
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