Netflix on Wednesday announced its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2011. The company noted $876 million in revenue, up 47% from the same quarter last year, and earnings per share of $0.73. Analysts had pegged the company to report revenue in the ballpark of $857.4 million and EPS of $0.54, Barron’s relayed. Netflix also said it added 220,000 new subscribers, a far cry from the 800,000 it lost during the third quarter, and now serves 21.67 million streaming customers in the United States. The company...

MetroPCS on Thursday announced its fourth quarter 2011 subscriber results. The carrier added 197,000 net subscribers, which missed analyst expectations that the carrier would add between 214,000 and 250,000 net customer additions, Reuters said. The company stated that it ended the year with more than 9.3 million total subscribers and said it added about 1.2 million subscribers during the 2011 calendar year. Churn took a turn for the worse since the fourth quarter of 2010, however; the company reported 3.7% c...

More than 50% of Sprint’s net new subscriber additions at any given time utilize a government subsidy program called “Lifeline,” which provides low-income Americans with free wireless minutes each month. Sprint provides the service under its “Assurance Wireless” brand, and it makes money beyond the small government subsidies when Lifeline customers spill over their monthly pool of minutes. Actual figures are not available, but the carrier is reportedly nearing a total of 2 millio...

Shares of Netflix stock plummeted more than 27% in after-hours trading as the company revealed it lost more than 800,000 customers in the third quarter. Netflix now serves 23.8 million total customers and it reported third-quarter revenue of $822 million, beating estimates of $812 million. Earnings worked out to $1.16 per share, which also beat Wall Street’s consensus of $0.96. “While we dramatically improved our $7.99 unlimited streaming service by embracing new platforms, simplifying user-interf...

MetroPCS is interested in purchasing spectrum and subscribers from AT&T and T-Mobile, Bloomberg said Friday. Leap Wireless and Dish Network were also approached and Leap may still be interested in making an offer. The deal with MetroPCS would likely amount to less than $4 billion. In August, The Wall Street Journal revealed AT&T had hired Bank of America’s Merill Lynch to advise it on selling as much as $8 billion in assets. Later that month, the United States government sued to block the planne...

Spotify now has more than 250,000 subscribers in the United States, Reuters reported recently. The service also now has more than 2 million paid subscribers around the globe. The figures have not yet been confirmed by Spotify, but Reuters said CEO Daniel Ek disclosed the numbers in September. Spotify, which made its U.S. debut in July, offers users free ad-supported access to a library with millions of songs. It also offers a $4.99 monthly option with unlimited streaming and no ads, or a $9.99 subscription th...

AT&T has approached several U.S. wireless carriers offering to sell assets, spectrum and wireless subscribers in an effort to win the government’s blessing for its planned acquisition of T-Mobile USA, Bloomberg reported on Monday. MetroPCS, Leap Wireless, CenturyLink, Dish Network and Sprint were among the the companies approached in the private talks. AT&T’s move is no doubt a response to recent lawsuits that were filed by the Department of Justice and Sprint. The Department of Justice fi...

Sprint on Thursday reported greater than expected losses in the second quarter despite modest revenue growth. The nation’s No. 3 carrier pulled in $8.3 billion in its June quarter, up 4% from the same quarter a year prior, but it wasn’t enough to bring the company back into the black. Sprint’s net losses in the second quarter totalled $827 million, 11% worse than the $760 million loss it reported in the second quarter of 2010. On the bright side, however, those losses include $588 million in...

Netflix could shed as many as 2.5 million paying customers as a result of its recent move to significantly increase the monthly cost of its DVDs-by-mail rental service. Netflix announced earlier this month that it would be adjusting its monthly rate plans. Whereas subscribers had been able to stream unlimited digital content and receive DVD rentals by mail for as little as $9.99 per month, Netflix’s new combination plans start at $15.98 per month, a 60% increase. Research firm TDG polled 500 Netflix cu...

Verizon Communications on Friday reported second-quarter earnings that topped the Street’s estimates, though it failed to match AT&T’s impressive wireless growth during the quarter. Revenue climbed to $27.5 billion in the June quarter, up 2.8% from the same quarter last year. EPS was up 6 cents sequentially to $0.57, a huge swing from the second quarter in 2010 when Verizon reported a loss of $0.42 per share. In wireless, the carrier netted 2.2 million subscribers — or “total connectio...

Research In Motion on Thursday announced some serious heat in the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region — the BlackBerry maker said it recently added more than a million new subscribers in less than three weeks. ”BlackBerry continues momentum across EMEA with 1 Million+ new subscribers added in less than 3 weeks,” RIM posted from its Twitter account. RIM no longer includes subscriber additions or totals in its quarterly earnings reports, but when it last did in the three-month perio...

Twitter’s vice president of international strategy, Katie Stanton, recently confirmed that the social network now has more than 200 million users. With 70% of those users are tweeting from outside of the United States. Japan is home to the Emperors’ share of tweets with more than 25% of posts originating from there. Twitter, which launched in July of 2006, adds a whopping 500,000 new users per day. (more…)

Verizon Wireless confirmed that it has more than 500,000 subscribers using its 4G LTE network. The HTC Thunderbolt, which launched as Verizon’s first 4G LTE phone, is responsible for 260,000 of those subscriptions. The wireless carrier said that it added about 500,000 4G LTE customers this quarter in addition to the 65,000 early adopters who signed on in Q4. Big Red will continue to build out its 4G LTE device portfolio in the coming months. In addition to the HTC Thunderbolt and Samsung DROID Charge â€...

AT&T on Wednesday reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2011. The report is highlighted by impressive iPhone activations that were up by almost 1 million units year-over-year to 3.6 million. Many analysts believed Verizon Wireless’ launch of the iPhone 4 in early February would have a tremendous impact on AT&T’s iPhone business, but the effects were far less significant than expected. First-quarter revenue came in at $31.2 billion, up 2.3% over the same quarter last year, but oper...