Netflix earnings, subscribers and streaming growth have analysts drooling over a theoretical Amazon buy
It's total pie-in-sky speculation, completely lacking in serious evidence or even vague "sources familiar with the matter," but for some reason, after two and a half years of hard rumoring, analysts seem more sure than ever that Amazon is looking into a Netflix acquisition. Netflix just announced some pretty attractive quarterly earnings, along with some nice hard numbers: it added one million subscribers in Q4 to notch itself past the 12 million mark, and 48% of its customers streamed at least 15 minutes of video off of Instant Watch -- compared to 28% a year ago. The logic goes that Amazon's looking to position itself as a digital goods purveyor, and Netflix is doing a bang up job of that very thing. Sounds just fine to us, but if Amazon tries to lock us into E Ink Netflix streaming on the Kindle, some heads are going to roll. There's naturally no comment from Netflix or Amazon on the speculation.
[Thanks, Steve H.]
