Well, that title should capture your attention!  One of my favorite bloggers is Rick Aristotle Munarriz who writes investment advice for a blog called The Motley Fool, designed to “educate, amuse and enrich.”  On January 17, he published a post about Netflix in 2015, in which he asserted that Netflix is one of the companies that most intrigues him.  I mean, you’ve got to love their story so far.  First scratching and crawling as a start up, then their meteoric rise to fame as a DVD mailing service that dabbled in streaming, followed by their equally tragic fall from grace in 2011.  Munarriz asserts, and I agree with him, that Netflix will resist the urge to sell itself to the highest bidder.

Sure, 2012 won’t look pretty.  There are class action suits popping up, charging Netflix with insider trading.  That sounds like a far stretch.  After all, if Reed Hastings was engaged in insider trading, wouldn’t he have been able to foresee some of those big mistakes he made and have positioned himself or other investors to cash out, rather than having him and investors take a big pay cut?

Munarriz also believes that Netflix’s biggest threats in 2015 won’t be the likes of Amazon, Vudu or Hulu.  Instead, Google and Apple will emerge as serious competition.  With their push to make Smart TV a reality, I have to say good call, Rick.  And Rick, if you’re right, we’ll finally be seeing the end of the fat cable bill.  It won’t, however, be by video streaming services providers that offers every single title.  The entertainment industry won’t give that much power to one entity.  They will continue to hold back content with the hopes of enticing consumers to embrace cloud digital content lockers, where they will market some content for a higher profit.  That’s not necessarily all bad, as long as we break the unholy ties between pay television and entertainment companies.