Here’s the next stop on Reed Hastings’s world tour: His video service plans to launch in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland by the end of the year.
The move is both expected and a sore spot with some Netflix investors. The company’s expansion outside the U.S. (starting with Canada, moving to Latin America and then the U.K.) has been an expensive one, with mixed results.
Netflix had already announced that it would be expanding again in 2012; last month, it told Wall Street that it would lose money in Q4 because of a move into “an additional attractive European market.”
More than 3.6 million of the company’s 27 million streaming-video subscribers come from outside the U.S.
Canada has worked well for Hastings, but he admits that the company has stumbled in Latin America. In the U.K., Netflix says, it has acquired a million subscribers in its first six months of operation, putting it ahead of Amazon’s Lovefilm, which it will also compete with in some of its Scandinavian markets.