The share price shot up by over 23 percent to around 214.50 dollars in new york on tuesday. The service is not yet available in germany.
Netflix had experienced problems with a failed corporate reorganization and TV content licensing in previous quarters. Group CEO reed hastings wanted to spin off the DVD mail order business from online streaming – but customers ran up a storm over an additional fee. All that has now faded into the background. Globally, netflix gained three million online subscribers and now has a total of over 36 million users, including 29.2 million in the U.S.
Quarterly sales rose 18 percent year-on-year to just over one billion dollars, the company announced after the U.S. Stock market closed on monday. At the end of the day, there was only a dark profit of 2.7 million dollars. A year earlier, however, netflix had still lost 4.6 million dollars.
The political series "house of cards" started in the USA in february and was only available on netflix. Currently, the second season is in the works. Kevin spacey ("american beauty") plays a deputy who takes on the u.S. President. Netflix offered a free trial period for the series – only just under 8,000 customers had actually checked out afterwards, he said. In the current quarter, netflix expects to add about 880,000 new streaming customers in the U.S.
At the same time, the company announced a new family subscription for just under 12 dollars a month, with which up to four different videos can be viewed per household. So far, the upper limit is two. In DVD distribution, netflix still has around eight million customers after a slight decline.