In these recessionary times, the stock market doesn’t get nearly the attention that it did back in 1997 when Netflix was founded and every dotcom was looking for a big initial public offering. But if you’re the head of a publicly traded company stock price still matters a lot.

Just ask Reed Hastings, the CEO and co-founder of Netflix. On Sunday, he attempted to address the decline in stock value his company has undergone since announcing a new pricing structure in July. Following what’s become the standard social media playbook for restoring customer trust after a corporate blunder, he wrote a post that sought to be contrite about past mistakes and transparent about future plans.

The result? On Monday Netflix stock dropped a whopping 7.37% on a day when the exchange it’s traded on only dropped 0.36%.

On second thought, maybe that blog post didn’t actually matter since the last three days of trading saw Netflix stock drop 31.56%. That’s part of a total decrease in stock value of 43.36% since the company announced its new pricing scheme. Granted, this time period includes some big drops in the the composite stock indexes too, but nothing approaching the drubbing Netflix has taken.

Read more…

Posted by Brian Steel

Last night, I experienced my first introduction to Silverlight. I finally had the opportunity to catch up on some of the Olympic games that I had missed. So, I figured what the heck, why not check out the games online? After a simple Google search, I found NBCOlympics.com. I clicked through the site in order to watch some Olympic events only to discover that I must download the Silverlight plug-in software before proceeding. Silverlight is Microsoft’s cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-device plug-in software solution for embedded streaming media player technologies, which happens to be .NET compatible. Although I anticipated my experience to be much worse, I was pleasantly surprised. One click and a minute later the .DMG file was on my desktop. I do not know why Microsoft software runs so much smoother on Macintosh?

Anyway, upon completion of the software install, I was back on NBCOlympics.com watching Olympic programming such as Women’s Archery, Softball and Kayaking. You know all the extremely important ‘mainstream’ Olympic events. It was great! The Silverlight player was easy to use and the streams were like watching the real event on a really small screen with the option to enlarge. However I do not recommend the enlarge feature it is not so great, the playback becomes ‘blocky,’ ‘distorted’ and difficult to watch.

Read more…