Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, January 19

• Netflix Profit Rises 56 Percent to $67 Million, Adds International Subscribers; Shares Jump 8%: Netflix added a record 7.05 million streaming members in the three months that ended Dec. 31, up from the 5.59 million net additions in the same period of 2015. That growth, in domestic and international markets, beat its forecast of 5.2 million new members for the quarter. Netflix now has a total of 93.8 million members. Fueling the increase in subscribers was a rapid rise in Netflix memberships abroad. The company said it is learning “how best to match content with audiences tastes around the world.” It added 5.1 million international members in the quarter, and now has 44.4 million members outside the United States, more than 47 percent of its total membership. Netflix cited its original series “Marvel’s Luke Cage” and “The Crown” as worldwide hits. It said it planned to invest more than $6 billion in content this year, up from $5 billion in 2016. Profits are rising steadily. Net income increased 56 percent to $67 million in the quarter from the same period in 2015. The company projected that profits would reach $165 million in the current quarter, up from $28 million in the period a year ago. “We don’t really believe in hockey-stick businesses, like suddenly we will turn significantly profitable at 200 million members,” Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, said during a conference call. “We think it is much smarter to grow into that bit by bit.” Netflix’s stock price is typically volatile on days when the company reports earnings, and Wednesday was no exception. The earnings report sent shares up about 8 percent in after-hours trading. Netflix shares rose about 8 percent for all of 2016, after having surged 135 percent for 2015, as the top performer on the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.

• Google and Twitter have agreed to an acquisition deal — just not the one many expected three months ago. Google is acquiring Twitter’s suite of developer products, including its developer suite Fabric which includes the crash reporting service Crashlytics. Twitter acquired Crashlytics back in 2013. The two companies are not sharing deal terms, but every member of Twitter’s Fabric team has been offered a job at Google. One source estimated the team at around 60 employees. Fabric is the collection of products that Twitter rolled out 18 months ago to try and encourage mobile app developers to integrate more closely with Twitter’s core app. But when the company announced another round of layoffs back in October, it also added that it would be refocusing the company around what employees call “Bluebird,” the main Twitter app. This was less than a month after Twitter decided to forgo its annual developer conference, Flight, a flag that Twitter was trying to figure out what to do with Fabric amid all the changes. In the fall, Twitter started exploring options to offload its fringe businesses, like Fabric and Vine, the latter of which has since been shut down. At least one other company, Microsoft, showed some interest in acquiring Fabric, according to multiple sources. But now Google is taking on Fabric and plans to integrate it with its own developer team, Firebase, according to a blog post. Firebase, a backend-as-a-service startup, was acquired by Google in 2014. The developer platform has since expanded, reportedly roughly quadrupling its number of users to 450,000 by mid-2016 and adding analytics capabilities and mobile development tools.