by Julia Pierrepont III
LOS ANGELES, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Five-hundred U.S. dollars. It is the price target predicted by analysts at GBH Insights for Netflix's share on Tuesday.
Bumping up from 400 U.S. dollars previously, surpassing the 490 U.S. dollars that analysts at Goldman Sachs assigned last week and representing a near 30 percent premium to Netflix's closing price on Monday, the online streaming giant, is taking on all comers in its race toward the top spot in the entertainment industry's Big Boys Club.
Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, the online service as its known now didn't launch until 2007, didn't go international until 2010, then took off with a vengeance.
"Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid, and uneconomic, and then they'll turn out to be right," said CEO Hastings.
As an indicator of just how profound an upheaval the global entertainment industry has experienced in the past decade, Netflix' near miraculous subscriber growth has enabled the company's market cap to soar past entrenched monoliths like Time Warner (85 billion U.S. dollars), CBS (20 billion U.S. dollars), and Viacom (20 billion U.S. dollars) in just ten short years.
This week heralded a significant up-tick in Netflix's net worth following the company's better-than-expected subscriber enrollments over the past quarter.
According to GBH Insights' prediction for Netflix, whose highest on Wall Street so far, the company will have market value about 217.35 billion U.S. dollars compared with 172 billion U.S. dollars at present.
This enabled their market cap to surge past telecom-cable giant, Comcast (147 billion U.S. dollars), parent company to NBCUniversal (30 billion U.S. dollars), including Dreamworks, Universal Studios, MSNBC and others.
Even more astonishing is that Disney's reign as the one of the most valuable entertainment companies on earth ended suddenly as a plucky upstart, Netflix, seized the crown.
"Netflix shook it up, brought this whole new generation of people who said, 'I watch things when I want to watch, how I want to watch, where I want to watch, and that's something that no one's going to ever forget," said Mike Colter, Marvel's Luke Cage. "This has changed the game completely, and I think it's the tip of the iceberg."
The streaming giant leapfrogged over the 95 year-old juggernaut, the Walt Disney Company, founded by iconic animator, Walt Disney, back in 1924.
Beating out Disney, whose market value is about 150 to 160 billion U.S. dollars to date, is no easy matter, as they are the virtually uncontested king of content, with the richest IP treasure chest in Hollywood.
They own Marvel Studios, home of Iron Man, Spider-Man, Avengers, Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the Black Panther franchises; Pixar, with Frozen, Kung Fu Panda, Shrek, CoCo, Toy Story, etc; Lucas Film, which owns the Star Wars franchise, not to mention the Disneyland Parks.
But, at this stage, it would be premature to discount Disney's clout and ability to adapt. With its vast library of quality films and programming, Disney is throwing its hat in the ring to compete in the over-the-top market with its own online streaming service.
It also owns 30 percent of one of Netflix' top competitors, Hulu, best known for Handmaiden's Tale. More importantly, when its multi-year contract with Netflix expires, Disney will be able to claw back its top rated Star Wars and Marvel titles and stream them exclusively on its own site.
Netflix now has set its sights on the only two telecom giants that still outweigh them, dollar for dollar: AT&T(198 billion U.S. dollars) and Verizon (198 billion U.S. dollars).
But Netflix will be hard put to catch AT&T, at least, since the U.S. Justice Department approved telecom giant AT&T's 85 billion U.S. dollars bid for with Time Warner. Though opposed by the White House, due to Trump's personal dispute with CNN, it was approved last week by the U.S. District Court judge, Richard Leon.
Time Warner is parent to the Wonder Woman, Dark Knight, Harry Potter, Superman, Matrix, Lord of the Rings and Hobbit franchises, as well as HBO, DC Comics, CNN, and TBS, which will make AT&T into an IP content powerhouse overnight.
But, with Netflix's recent announcement of an important licensing deal with popular streaming platform, iQIYI, subsidiary of China's giant search engine, Baidu, they may be unstoppable.
"Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. We define entire epochs of humanity by the technology they use," said Netflix CEO Hastings, "There is a revolution happening and within two years I think that Wi-Fi and Netflix will be built into all televisions."
