Yahoo Finance Live looks at several of the day’s trending stock tickers, including Netflix as younger subscribers respond to the streaming platform’s rising subscription costs.
Video Transcript
RACHELLE AKUFFO: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live, everyone. It’s time for our triple play, the three tickers that have caught our eye today. Now my pick to start is Sony, ticker of the same name, S-O-N-Y. Now it’s making its move to stay ahead in the war of the consoles with its new three-tiered subscription service. Now, even though shares are off their session highs, they’re still slightly up for the day, about 2/3 of a percent there. Still in positive territory, but also still down year to date. Now this new PlayStation Plus service launches in June, and it’s meant to rival Microsoft’s Game Pass, a similar subscription, Netflix-style service. Now, this will combine Sony’s Plus service with its 4 to 8 million subscribers, and it also adds in PlayStation’s Now service, and that has 3.2 million users. But it also gives access to more than 700 games altogether. DAVE BRIGGS: Rachelle, my research includes a 14-year-old boy who jumped at the opportunity when I mentioned to him. And I actually said it sounds like a really good deal, so I appreciate that added bill to my streaming. But the big question in the industry is, of course, that merger. Microsoft and Activision still on hold. And it looked like a green light initially, and now looking like that may not be approved after all. And that will really foretell the future of that entire industry in the short-term. My play is Netflix. We’ve been talking a lot about the streamers this week, of course, because the Oscars, but now a new report from Deloitte has some bad news in it for the streaming networks. And it has to do with Gen Z and millennials. They are the most likely to cancel a streaming subscription. More than 50% of both groups have either canceled or added and then canceled a streaming subscription in the last six months. So they are shopping around constantly for new deals and new content. What they are picking up in increased numbers are social media content and gaming, back to your original point about that Sony subscription. So gaming is the big driver there in the Deloitte. So as for the stock, NFLX, it is up today about 5% or about $17 a share to $3.95. But year to date, needless to say, it’s been rough over the last year, down 23%. BRAD SMITH: And it’s remarkable how both of the stocks that you’ve picked actually tie into one another, as you were mentioning, Dave, because of the fact that one impacts the other and the fact that you don’t have the number of– and this shines, once again, a light on the fact that all of the investments that streaming platforms had said that they were going to make either into a gaming type of play within their platform, Netflix had teased this arcade or some type of gaming play within their platform for years. And it looked like they were going to get that off the ground. It did not. There was not a ton of fanfare. And so at the end of the day, it does come down to how much of that attention– because it’s a battle for screen time at the end of the day. And in the screen wars, gaming is going to continue to take share away from some of not just the streaming platforms, but also the social media platforms. And so how can all of these companies best position themselves in that future reality, where virtual reality, or the Metaverse, starts to steal away some of those eyeballs, the attention, and time spent on their platforms? And so that’s something to keep solely in focus. And the Deloitte digital media trends survey squarely laid that out, as you mentioned as well. Just lastly here, one area that we hope continues to have a ton of fanfare for our sake is investing. And Robinhood is expanding the number of hours that people are going to be allowed to invest. And this adds on what they had already had in kind of their extended trading hours. But at the end of the day, we’re taking a look at shares of HOOD on today’s trading activity, moving higher as of right now, and on this announcement, jumping by about 25% earlier in the day. My return feed’s just a little small here, so I’m trying to make out that number. But it looks like it’s holding on to those gains. However, broader context of things, still has a ways to go to get back to some of those post-IPO highs. We’ll see if they can do this. But of course, this day and the move higher on the expanded amount of trading hours and what that order flow spread out over an extended period of time could mean for Robinhood perhaps means less of that order flow back up where they’re having to route that correctly and so forth. So, at the end of the day, Robinhood investors, at least, latching on to this piece of news on today’s activity here. RACHELLE AKUFFO: And that’s one of those meme stocks that really opened things up for retail investors. They have to keep adding these caveats about the risks of investing and doing your homework, so hopefully, as they expand, some of those warnings will continue, so that people don’t just sort of jump in, buy the dip, and then panic buy. Hopefully, there’s also some teaching that’ll go along with that expansion as well. DAVE BRIGGS: All right, hope so. Coming up after the break, has the sports–
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