Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google were the four leading global brands at the end of 2023, according to consulting firm Interbrand. They’re are also four of the world’s five most valuable companies.

The other is Nvidia, which for a time this week, surpassed Microsoft to become the largest company in the world by market cap.

But despite its $3.1 trillion valuation (it reached $3.3 trillion before a two-day slide), Nvidia doesn’t even crack the top 100 most iconic names on Interbrand’s most recent list, which is populated by such companies as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Disney and Netflix.

Nvidia’s historic rise in valuation — the stock has climbed almost ninefold since the end of 2022 — has been driven almost entirely by demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs) that are at the heart of the boom in generative artificial intelligence and, more broadly, by the hype over AI. Nvidia has over 80% of the market for chips used to train and deploy AI software like ChatGPT. A handful of huge tech companies are the primary buyers of its chips.

The speed of Nvidia’s ascent and its relative lack of contact with consumers along the way combines to put the 31-year-old company’s brand recognition on Main Street far behind its allure on Wall Street. No. 100 on Interbrand’s list for 2023 is Japanese camera maker Canon, with Dutch brewer Heineken at No. 99.

“As a product company recently moving onto a global stage, Nvidia has not had time, nor has it dedicated resources, to change its role of brand and strengthen its brand to protect future revenue,” Greg Silverman, Interbrand’s global director of brand economics, said in an email. The risk for Nvidia, Silverman added, is that its “weak brand strength will limit how valuable it will be, despite its market cap heights.”

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment.

Nvidia’s annual revenue growth has exceeded 200% in each of the past three quarters. For fiscal 2025, revenue is expected to almost double from a year earlier to over $120 billion, according to LSEG.

The company’s data center GPUs, which made up 85% of sales in the most recent quarter, are installed in massive facilities, and typically require a team of expensive data science and supercomputing experts to configure them to efficiently create AI software.

By contrast, Apple, ranked No. 1 by Interbrand, makes the vast majority of its money by selling iPhones and other devices to consumers across the globe. Microsoft, ranked second, is an enterprise sales giant, but is ubiquitously known for its Windows and Office software. Third-ranked Amazon strives to be consumers’ everything store, and No. 4 Google is, for many people, the front door to the internet.

Rounding out Interbrand’s top 10 are South Korean electronics giant Samsung, along with three car companies (Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and BMW), Coca-Cola and Nike.

Further down the list, at No. 24, is Nvidia rival Intel, which is best known for making the processor at the heart of laptops and PCs and for its long-running “Intel Inside” advertising campaign. Even Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a company that builds servers, made the list at No. 91.

However, a competing survey shows that Nvidia’s brand value is catching up to that of its peers.

In a ranking of the 100 most valuable global brands published this month by Kantar BrandZ, Nvidia landed at No. 6, leaping 18 places from its prior survey. The brand’s overall valued jumped 178% in a year to an estimate of about $202 billion. Kantar surveys enterprise buyers to evaluate brands that primarily sell to other businesses to come up with a total estimate of brand value.

“Nvidia is pound for pound as relevant and meaningful to that B2B buyer that’s looking to make big, large purchases in-house for their company as Apple is to the consumer who’s buying an iPad or a Mac,” Marc Glovsky, senior brand strategist at Kantar, told CNBC.

And while Nvidia may not be a name known to your parents — or your kids — it does have resonance in a particular corner of the consumer world. Just ask your hard-core gaming buddy.

When Nvidia was founded in 1991, AI was a nascent field. The company’s primary focus was on designing chips that could draw digital triangles quickly, a basic capability that led to a huge expansion in 3D games.

For years, Nvidia, and its GeForce brand and green logo were well known to the type of people who tweaked their computers to run the most advanced games. Nvidia provides the chips for the Nintendo Switch console, which has shipped over 140 million units around the world.

Unlike Intel, Nvidia never put its name in front of consumers with flashy ad campaigns. And gaming is now just a nice side business for chipmaker. In the latest quarter, it accounted for $2.6 billion of revenue, or 10% of total sales, rising 18% year over year.

When it comes to Nvidia’s most important products, companies and institutions vying for its AI chips have to go through an extensive quoting and sales process, often through a computer-equipment company, like Dell or HPE. Those vendors sell complete systems, including memory, a central processor and other parts. Even experts who want to train AI models are more likely to rent Nvidia access through a cloud provider than build their own server clusters.

Still, Nvidia’s name recognition is rapidly increasing. Among retail investors, Nvidia has emerged as the most widely held stock, according to data collected and published last month by Vanda Research.

And while the name didn’t make Interbrand’s top 100 list for 2023, the firm’s data shows its brand awareness quadrupled in the past 12 months, which will help when it’s time for the next ranking, Silverman said.

Maybe by then people will know how to say its name, a topic that’d been the source of debate on obscure gaming forums. The company pronounces it en-VID-ia.

WATCH: The ‘Magnificent Seven’ should have another good earnings season

The NFL isn’t just the most popular sports league in the U.S., it’s also the most valuable with the highest-rated programming and the priciest ad time.

In 2021 the league signed an estimated $110 billion worth of media deals covering 11 years, which reportedly was nearly double the value of its previous contracts.

“If you’re the most valuable content on those platforms, you’re going to be the bulk of their investment. And that’s what we are,” said Brian Rolapp, chief media and business officer for the NFL.

An average of nearly 18 million people tuned in to watch football games across TV and digital platforms during the 2023 regular season, the highest since 2015 and the second-highest ever, according to the NFL.

The pinnacle of the NFL’s popularity is the Super Bowl, the biggest television event of the year. Of the 30 most-watched broadcasts of all time in the U.S., 22 have been Super Bowl games, according to Nielsen.

The NFL’s move to ESPN in the late 1980s catapulted the rise of cable TV. Now, its jump into streaming is having ripple effects across the media and tech landscape.

“Media is 60% of the revenue of the NFL,” said Robert Kraft, principal owner of the New England Patriots. “If we don’t stay fluid and in tune with what the times are, then we’d have a real issue.”

With tech giants Alphabet and Amazon, along with NBCUniversal’s Peacock, snapping up digital rights to NFL games, and with the announcement this week that Disney‘s ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery are launching a streaming service tailored to sports fans, it’s clear that streaming is poised to be the NFL’s next frontier, despite some backlash from fans.

“You will see us continue to lean into digital,” Rolapp told CNBC. “The trick will be doing it in a way that’s fan friendly, and doing it in a way that continues getting as much football to as many people as possible.”

Watch the documentary to learn more about how streaming is transforming the NFL.

Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of Peacock and CNBC

Amazon on Thursday reported fourth-quarter results that sailed past analysts’ estimates, and gave strong guidance for the current quarter. The stock climbed more than 8% in extended trading.

Here are the results:

• Earnings per share: $1.00 vs. 80 cents expected by LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv
• Revenue: $170 billion vs. $166.2 billion expected by LSEG

Wall Street is also watching several other numbers in the report:

• Amazon Web Services: $24.2 billion vs. $24.2 billion, according to StreetAccount
• Advertising: $14.7 billion vs. $14.2 billion, according to StreetAccount

Amazon said first-quarter sales will be between $138 billion and $143.5 billion, representing growth of 8% to 13%. Analysts were expecting revenue of $142.1 billion, according to Refinitiv.

Amazon easily topped Wall Street’s expectations for earnings, indicating that CEO Andy Jassy’s efforts to rein in costs are paying off. Net income surged to $10.6 billion, or $1.00 per share, compared to $278 million, or 3 cents per share, a year earlier.

The company laid off 27,000 employees between late 2022 and mid-2023, and ended some of its more unproven bets. It has continued to look for ways to trim expenses in other areas, such as its fulfillment business. In January, it announced cuts in Prime Video, MGM Studios and Twitch, among other units.

Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told reporters on Thursday that the company will continue to take a careful approach on new investments, but that it doesn’t see 2024 “as a year of efficiency type thing.”

“We’re going to continue to invest in new things and new areas and things that are resonating with customers,” Olsavsky said. “Where we can find efficiencies and do more with less, we’re going to do that as well.”

Revenue jumped 14% to $170 billion in the fourth quarter. The period reflects results from the holiday shopping season and Amazon’s October Prime Day event, both of which the company said exceeded its expectations.

“This Q4 was a record-breaking Holiday shopping season and closed out a robust 2023 for Amazon,” Jassy said in a statement. “As we enter 2024, our teams are delivering at a rapid clip, and we have a lot in front of us to be excited about.”

Sales at Amazon Web Services climbed 13% in the fourth quarter to $24.2 billion, in line with Wall Street’s forecast. That marks a slight uptick from the previous quarter, when sales expanded 12%, but it’s a deceleration from the year-ago period, when sales grew 20%.

For the past year, growth in AWS has slowed, as businesses trimmed their cloud spend. But Olsavsky said the company is seeing those cost optimizations diminish, and new workloads are picking up. He said there has been “a lot of interest” in AWS’ generative artificial intelligence products, such as “Q,” an AI chatbot for businesses.

Jassy said on a conference call with analysts that generative AI services remain a “relatively small” business, but the company believes they could drive “tens of billions of dollars” in revenue within the next several years.

Ahead of its earnings release Thursday, Amazon announced a generative AI shopping assistant, dubbed Rufus, which it’s testing among a subset of users in the U.S.

Amazon’s profitable advertising unit saw sales grow 27% year over year to $14.7 billion. Last month, the company began showing ads on Prime Video content, in a move analysts project will generate substantial new revenue for the business. Olsavsky said the company has seen “a lot of enthusiasm” from advertisers, but that Amazon plans to keep ad loads low.

In the preface to Hamilton Helmer’s “7 Powers: The Basics of Business Strategy,” published in 2016, Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings describes what happens when market leaders don’t adapt to new competitive forces.

“Throughout my business career, I’ve often seen powerful holders, once praised for their business acumen, fail to adapt to the new competitive reality,” Hastings wrote. “The result is always a stunning drop of grace.”

Six years later, Hastings finds himself in the role of a starter who has so far experienced a stunning fall from grace. Shares of Netflix have fallen more than 70% so far. The company announced in April that it expects to lose 2 million subscribers in the second quarter. Investors have been selling en masse as they question the size of the total addressable streaming market – a number Netflix previously said could reach 800 million. According to the latest census, Netflix has about 222 million subscribers worldwide.

Netflix executives are now pondering how they failed to adapt to a new competitive reality that was masked by huge subscriber profits during the Covid pandemic, when billions of people around the world stayed at home. Although the company is constantly producing big hits such as “Stranger Things” and “Squid Game”, Netflix is ​​rethinking many of the philosophies that destroyed the industry more than a decade ago.

The change in strategy, even on margins, is surprising for a company best known for destroying two industries – first video rental and then cable TV. Instead of inventing new ways to change what has become a crowded video streaming industry, Netflix is ​​reviewing almost every way it stands out from legacy media companies in the first place.

In other words, Hastings has decided that his best strategy now is not to break.

“It’s remarkable that Netflix is ​​looking for growth by rethinking many of its entrenched beliefs,” said Joel Mier, Netflix’s marketing director from 1999 to 2006 and a professor of marketing at the University of Richmond. “These decisions will clearly help revenue and subscriber growth in the short and medium term. The bigger question is how they will affect the company’s brand in the long run.”

Netflix declined to comment.

Hastings has long said that Netflix’s aversion to advertising is due to the added complexity of the business.

“Advertising seems easy until you get into it,” Hastings said in 2020. “Then you realize you have to take that revenue from other places because the overall advertising market isn’t growing, it’s actually shrinking right now.” It’s a hand-to-hand fight to get people to spend less on, you know, ABC and spend more on Netflix. Twenty years ago, we went public for about a dollar a share, and now we are [more than] $ 500. So I would say that our subscription-focused strategy works pretty well. “

Netflix is ​​no longer more than $ 500 per share. It closed at $ 169.69 on Monday.

Since making that comment in 2020, Hastings has been monitoring other streaming services, including Warner Bros.’s HBO Max. Discovery, NBCUniversal’s Peacock and Paramount Global’s Paramount + offer lower-priced services with unresponsive advertising. Disney plans to introduce cheaper ad-supported Disney + later this year.

In April, Hastings announced that he had changed his mind. Supported by Netflix ads “makes a lot of sense” for “users who would like to have a lower price and are tolerant of advertising,” he said.

Netflix has previously claimed to have found a void in the market without worrying about advertising. Niche shows that wouldn’t play well with advertisers who want scale could be valuable to Netflix if they bring enough subscribers to production budgets.

It remains to be seen whether Netflix will offer its full list of ad-supported content or whether certain broadcasts will be blocked only for non-ad subscribers.

Part of Netflix’s idea is to order content creators “straight to the series” instead of making traditional pilot episodes of shows and evaluating them based on a solid product. Other streamers followed suit after seeing Netflix attract A-list talent by skipping pilots.

“If you’re a typical studio, raising money for a pilot, and if it’s tested well, pick up the show, maybe do a few more episodes and wait for the ratings,” said Barry Enderwick, who worked in Netflix’s marketing department from 2001 to 2012. director of global marketing and customer acquisition, told CNBC in 2018.

“At Netflix, our data took our decisions for us, so we were just going to order two seasons. The creators of the show will ask us “Do you want to see notes? Don’t you want to see a pilot? We would say, “If you want from us.” The creators were overwhelmed. “

Ordering projects directly to series has given writers and producers security and often more money. The downside, Netflix found, is that it also led to series that didn’t turn out very well. Deadline noted 47 different examples of ordering Netflix live in series in 2020-2021 and 20 in 2022. While some are notable, such as “The Witcher: Blood Origin” and “This Show from the 90’s,” most are generated some noise.

Netflix plans to start hiring more pilots and slow down the series development process, according to people familiar with the matter. The hope is that the end result will lead to better programming and less fluff.

Netflix has no plans to reduce its overall content budget. However, he intends to redistribute the money to focus on quality after years of adding quantity to replenish his library, people said. Executives have added more original programming in recent years to avoid relying on licensed content – much of which has been downloaded by media companies that own it to complete their own streaming services.

Another feature of Netflix is ​​its long-standing decision to release full seasons of series at once, allowing users to watch episodes at their own pace.

“There’s no reason to play it every week,” said co-CEO Ted Sarandos in 2016. Getting away from TV for appointments is huge. Then why are you pulling people back to something they’re abandoning in huge quantities?

However, in recent years, Netflix has been experimenting with weekly releases for some reality shows instead of mass releases. So far, this has not extended to streaming with scripts.

“We fundamentally believe we want to give our members a choice of how to watch,” said Peter Friedlander, Netflix’s screenwriting director for the United States and Canada, earlier this month. “So giving them that option in these scripted series to watch as much as they want to watch when they watch it is still fundamental to what we want to provide.”

But people familiar with the matter said Netflix will continue to play with weekly releases for certain types of series, such as reality TV and other competition-based shows.

Netflix’s opposition to weekly scripting may be the next thing you need to go for.

Netflix has always rejected bidding for live sports, a major part of legacy media companies.

“To follow a competitor, never, never, never,” Hastings said in 2018. We have so much to do in our field, so we don’t try to copy others, whether it’s a linear cable, there are many things we don’t. We don’t do (live) news, we don’t do (live) sports. But what we do, we try to do really well. “

Yet last year, Hastings said Netflix would consider bidding for live Formula One rights to match the success of its Drive to Survive documentary series, which airs every race season.

“Several years ago, the rights to Formula One were sold,” Hastings told German magazine Der Spiegel in September. “We weren’t among the bidders then, we would think about it today.”

This month, Business Insider announced that Netflix has been negotiating Formula One for months for broadcasting rights in the United States.

Adding live sports could give Netflix a new audience, but that’s in the face of Netflix’s recent aversion to spending big money on licensed programming.

For many years, Netflix has dismissed password sharing as a strange side issue that simply demonstrates the popularity of its product. In 2017, the Netflix corporate account tweeted “Love shares a password.”

But as Netflix’s growth has slowed, executives see the crackdown on password-sharing as a new engine to boost revenue growth. “We are working on how to earn revenue from sharing. We’ve been thinking about this for several years, “Hastings said during a conference call on the company’s profits in April. “But when we were growing fast, it wasn’t a high priority for work. And now we’re working very hard on it.”

Next year, Netflix plans to charge additional fees for accounts that are clearly shared with users outside the home.

“We’re not trying to stop this sharing, but we’re going to ask you to pay a little more so you can share with her so she can benefit and value the service, but we’re also getting the revenue from this viewing,” he said. Chief Operating Officer Greg Peters during the same call, adding that this “will allow us to bring revenue to everyone who watches and who gets value from the entertainment we offer.”

CNBC reported earlier on how the crackdown on password-sharing is likely to work.

Netflix became famous for its cultural presentation in 2009, which set out the company’s values. One of the main principles of the company is innovation. “You keep us agile by minimizing complexity and finding time for simplification.”

Netflix has taken advantage of being a pure gaming streaming company for years. While other media companies, such as Disney, are lagging behind due to conglomerate discounts and slow-growing or declining legacy assets, investors have liked one Netflix pony: streaming growth.

But that is slowly changing. Netflix announced last year that it was involved in video games. Netflix currently has 22 video games on its platform and aims to have 50 by the end of the year.

Adding a new vertical to streaming video could help Netflix give investors a new reason to bet on the company’s future growth. But it also potentially diminishes Hastings’ longstanding principle: that focusing on movies and TV shows is what sets Netflix apart.

“What we need to do is be a special play,” Hastings told CNBC in 2017. “We are focusing on how to really be the epitome of fun, joy, movies and TV shows.”

WATCH: Netflix is ​​probably best positioned among streamers in a recession, say retailers

– CNBC’s Sarah Wheaton contributed to this story.

Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC and CNBC.

Shares of Warner Bros. Discovery fell on Tuesday after the company warned that its profit for 2022 will be lower than expected in light of the “messy” combination of assets.

Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels said during the company’s first conference on earnings since the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery that “unexpected projects” and lower operating profits and cash flow for WarnerMedia for the first quarter led to new directions.

“Operating profit for the first quarter and cash flow for WarnerMedia were clearly below my expectations,” said Wiedenfels. “I currently estimate that WarnerMedia’s share of our baseline profit for 2022 will be about $ 500 million lower than I expected, with positive compensation of several hundred million dollars from Discovery of the combined company.

Shares fell more than 7% to trade around $ 19.90 per share in early morning trading.

While Wiedenfels declined to name the unexpected projects, one is CNN +. The new CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery David Zaslav decided to turn off WarnerMedia’s new streaming service last week, less than a month after it launched. WarnerMedia plans to spend hundreds of millions more on the service.

“Rule or not, management has decided to invest a large part of the incoming funds in a number of investment initiatives,” said Videnfels. “As I look under the hood here, again CNN + is just one example and I don’t want to go through a list of concrete examples, but there are a lot of big investments that lack what I would consider as a solid analytical, financial basis and meeting obstacles. return on investment, which I would like to see for large investments. “

Warner Bros. Discovery reported a 13% jump in revenue and steady growth in streaming subscribers for its first fiscal quarter on Tuesday. The results do not include the performance for the first quarter of WarnerMedia, which Discovery bought this month.

Here are the key numbers:

• Earnings per share: 69 cents, up from 21 cents in the first quarter of last year
• income: $ 3.16 billion compared to $ 2.79 billion in the first quarter of last year
• Discovery Streaming Clients: 24 million, which is 2 million more than in the previous quarter

The recently merged Warner Bros. Discovery, the result of the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, which ended on April 8, debuted as a pure gaming media company that investors can compare to Disney, Netflix and Paramount Global. Zaslav hopes to show Wall Street that the company’s new assets, including HBO Max and Discovery + streaming services, can compete globally for market share against the world’s largest entertainment companies.

“We are putting together a strategic framework and organization to manage our balanced approach to growing our business and maximizing the value of our storytelling, news and sports,” Zaslav said in a statement. “I could not be more excited about the great opportunity before us.

The combined company WarnerMedia-Discovery has a market value of over $ 48 billion.

Zaslav took his first steps toward streamlining the company last week when he shut down CNN + just weeks after it launched.

Zaslav plans to combine HBO Max and Discovery + in a bundled streaming service. The company has not announced whether the new combined product will be renamed or when this change will occur.

Executives said they would not hesitate to take action, citing their decision to shut down CNN + in just a month as an example.

Prior to these efforts, Discovery began halting promotion around Discovery + in the first quarter. The company said sales, general and administrative expenses fell 25 percent during the period, mainly due to lower marketing costs for Discovery + compared to last year’s launch.

Warner Bros. Discovery said it added 2 million streaming subscribers to Discovery during the quarter for a total of 24 million. This is in line with the added 2 million in the fourth quarter.

Last week, AT&T said HBO and HBO Max had 76.8 million subscribers at the end of the first quarter of 2022. The announcement marked the last time WarnerMedia will be part of AT&T’s revenue statement.

WATCH: Why CNN + is shutting down

Netflix surprised the world this week by announcing that it plans to finally tackle the common practice of password sharing.

More than 100 million households use a shared password, Netflix said Tuesday, including 30 million in the United States and Canada.

But the video streamer doesn’t plan to just freeze those shared accounts. Instead, the company will probably prefer to charge an additional fee for these accounts used by many people outside the home.

Netflix’s plan to capture this lost revenue will begin by sending a signal to account holders whose passwords are used by other households.

The company has already begun testing this feature in Peru, Costa Rica and Chile. For accounts that share a password between addresses, Netflix charges an additional fee for adding “sub-accounts” for up to two people away from home. Prices are different for each country – about $ 2.13 per month in Peru, $ 2.99 in Costa Rica and $ 2.92 in Chile, based on current exchange rates.

The company also allows people who use a shared password to transfer their personalized account information to either a new account or a profile, which allows them to keep their viewing history and recommendations.

“If you have a sister, let’s say she lives in another city, you want to share Netflix with her, that’s great,” said Chief Operating Officer Greg Peters during the company’s earnings conference. “We’re not trying to stop this sharing, but we’re going to ask you to pay a little more so you can share with her so she can benefit and value the service, but we’re also getting the revenue from this viewing.”

Netflix has not said how much revenue it expects to generate from implementing its global sharing strategy, although Peters said it estimates it will take about a year to implement pricing of its sub-accounts worldwide.

A study by research organization Time2Play suggests that about 80% of Americans who use someone else’s password will not receive their own new account if they cannot share the password. It does not examine how many current account payers would be willing to pay more to share with others.

Peters also suggested that the company could still change its pricing or further revise its testing strategy.

“It will take some time to understand this and strike the right balance,” he said. “So, just to set your expectations, it is my belief that we will go through about a year of repetition and then implement all of this so that we can launch this solution globally, including in markets like the United States.”

Netflix’s plan is unprecedented. No major streamer has ever shared passwords. Other owners of streaming services, such as Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Paramount Global are unlikely to set their own plans until they review Netflix’s password-sharing reforms.

Some account holders will no doubt be surprised to receive news from Netflix that their passwords are being shared. It is also unclear how long Netflix will allow those who view a shared account to maintain access if the primary account holder chooses not to pay the additional fee.

In addition, Netflix will need to step lightly on defining sharing passwords to avoid misidentifying people as abusers, such as family members who temporarily live away from home.

The reluctance to act against this group of users would probably save millions of people from Netflix’s repression – at least in the beginning.

“They will start with serial bullies,” said LightShed Partners media analyst Rich Greenfield. “If you have 15 people using your account, it’s pretty easy.”

The company is also unlikely to want its employees to get into disputes over what is classified as a home account and what qualifies as a sub-account. Challenging these definitions can be ugly for both employees and customers who have seen Netflix as the best brand in its class.

But Netflix knows who you are, Greenfield said, whether you use your own custom account or not.

Five years ago, Netflix actually encouraged password sharing. The company’s philosophy at the time was that it just wanted more views on its content, which in turn would make noise and lead to real subscriptions. This strategy seems to have paid off. Netflix subscriptions have been growing every quarter for more than 10 years – until the last quarter.

In 2017, the Netflix corporate account tweeted “Love shares a password.”

Now the company will be happy if you stop doing it.

Disclosure: Comcast’s NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC.

WATCH: Netflix will test an additional fee for sharing passwords

The repeal of Disney’s self-governing status in Florida could leave local taxpayers with more than $ 1 billion in bond debt, according to tax officials and lawmakers.

The Florida House of Representatives on Thursday passed a bill that would disband the Disney Special Enhancement area, escalating Gov. Ron DeSantis’ attack on the company over its opposition to the Florida Parental Rights Bill in Education, which critics called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. .

The U.S. Senate passed the bill Wednesday after it was first introduced Tuesday. He will now go to the governor for a signature.

Disney’s Reedy Creek Improvement Area was established in 1967 and gives Walt Disney Company full regulatory control over Disney World, as well as government services such as fire protection, emergency services, water, utilities, sanitation and infrastructure.

Tax experts and lawmakers say the removal of the area, which will take effect in June 2023, could have unintended consequences for county taxpayers.

Reedy Creek covers 25,000 acres in Orange and Osceola counties and includes four Disney theme parks, two water parks and a sports complex. It also includes the two small towns of Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista, which had a combined population of 53 in 2020, all either representatives or employees of Disney.

Disney is effectively taxed to fund Reedy Creek’s government services. While Reedy Creek’s exact tax flows are unclear, Scott Randolph, a tax collector for Orange County, said the Reedy Creek area collects approximately $ 105 million a year in total revenue.

In addition to $ 105 million, Disney also pays local property taxes. Public records show that Disney is the largest taxpayer in central Florida, paying more than $ 280 million in county property taxes between 2015 and 2020.

If the special area is disbanded, Orange and Osceola counties will have to provide the local services currently provided by Reedy Creek. And $ 105 million in revenue will disappear, which means county and local taxpayers will be on the hook for some or all of the added spending.

“If you disband Reedy Creek, that $ 105 million in revenue is literally gone, it’s not being transferred,” Randolph said.

The reason: Reedy Creek is what is known as an “independent tax district,” meaning that the tax revenue it generates is in addition to its local tax liabilities, not a substitute. If the county is eliminated, tax payments to Orange and Osceola counties will not increase, Randolph said.

Florida State Representative Randy Fine, who helped defend the bill, told CNBC on Thursday that local taxpayers would not pay more – and could actually benefit from eliminating Reedy Creek. Finn said the revenue from the taxes Disney pays will be transferred to the local government and could be more than paying for the added services.

“These taxes will continue to be paid,” he said. “They will simply be paid to Orange and Osceola counties instead of in this special area for improvement. Taxpayers could save money because you have duplicate services provided by this special area that are already provided by these municipalities. “

But lawmakers and tax experts warn that the bill poses an even bigger potential problem for taxpayers in the form of bonds worth more than $ 1 billion.

Reedy Creek has bond debts of between $ 1 billion and $ 1.7 billion, according to county financial records. Under Florida’s statute, if Reedy Creek is disbanded, those responsibilities will be transferred to local authorities – either Bay Lake, or Lake Buena Vista, or more likely, Orange and Osceola counties.

Senate Minority Leader Gary Farmer, D-Fort Lauderdale, tried to amend the bill to include further investigation into bond debt, but the amendment failed by a vote.

Farmer said the debt on the bonds could amount to more than $ 2 billion and that the tax authorities are increasing their estimates as they learn more about Reedy Creek’s outstanding debts.

“This is a very real impact, the extent of which we still do not fully understand,” Farmer said.

If $ 1.7 billion or more is transferred to Orange and Oceola counties, he said, the debt could be as high as $ 1,000 per taxpayer.

“If the counties stay in the bag, the state may have to come to their aid,” Farmer said. “So it’s not even just a tax issue for these two counties. It affects every taxpayer in Florida.”

Finn argues that if the bonds are transferred to the counties, the tax revenue that currently finances the bond payments will also be transferred.

“The Reedy Creek improvement area is local government right now,” he said. “So the taxpayers in this area already owe that money. Yes, the bonds will go to other municipal governments in the same place. But the revenue goes with them. Disney is taxed in this area for improvement. These taxes are used to pay this debt. “

Tax experts say that in order for the counties to raise additional revenue from Disney to pay off the debt on the bonds, the counties will have to create a new special tax area. Even if they create a new special Disney County, the tax rate will be limited below that of the current county, leaving Orange and Osceola counties with Reedy Creek’s debt service, but with less revenue to pay.

“We should not move at a distorted speed on something that could have such far-reaching economic consequences,” Farmer said.

Shares of Netflix fell 37% on Wednesday morning after the streamer reported gains on Tuesday night, which showed that it has lost subscribers in its last quarter and gave a weak outlook. The results led to a wave of downgrading from Wall Street due to concerns about the company’s long-term growth potential.

Netflix said several cross-winds are affecting growth, including competition and easing pandemic restrictions. The company was significantly boosted by coronavirus-based home stay orders as more and more people searched for digital entertainment. But people spent less time on digital platforms as vaccines unfolded and mandates eased.

The slower growth of household broadband also played a role in the company’s poor outlook. Netflix estimates that 100 million households share their subscription passwords with other family or friends, making it difficult to increase membership.

The company outlined changes to the pipeline to contribute to growth. He is considering a cheaper level supported by advertisements and suggests that repression against password sharing is imminent. And while analysts seemed generally positive about these changes, they mostly believed that it would take a year or two for them to be meaningfully implemented.

“Although their plans to re-accelerate growth (limiting password sharing and advertising model) have merit, they admit that they will not have a noticeable impact until the 24th, waiting a long time for what is now” show me a story “,” Analysts from Bank of America said in a note on Wednesday. The company was one of at least nine companies that downgraded Netflix because of the disappointing report.

“After what can only be called a shocking loss of subscribers in the first quarter and weak subscribers and financial guidance, we lowered our subscriber forecasts and significantly withdrew our profitability forecasts,” Pivotal analyst Jeffrey Vlodarchak wrote in a note Tuesday. The company downgraded the shares to sell them on purchase.

Wells Fargo analysts wrote in a note on Wednesday that downgraded the stock rating to an equal weight that “negative growth and investment to re-accelerate earnings are the highlight of the NFLX storyboard, in our opinion.”

Shares of several streaming services plunged on Wednesday morning along with Netflix as investors awaited updates on their growth. Shares of Disney fell about 5% after the opening of markets on Wednesday. Similarly, Roku shares fell about 7%, Paramount shares fell 11.7% and Warner Bros. Discovery fell about 5%.

“Gross supplement activity remains softer than expected, as such, subscription companies could see similar pressure this season of profits, although we note that the NFLX is unique in that it is much more pervasive, especially when password sharing is reported, “Wolfe Research said in a note Tuesday. The company kept its rating better.

– Michael Bloom of CNBC contributed to this report.

Today may be a gloomy day for your ex-boyfriend’s brother.

Netflix, the world’s largest video streaming company, has warned that global crackdown on password sharing is imminent. This time seems like a serious warning and could mean the end of the widespread practice of borrowing entry information from a family member or friend – or a free acquaintance.

Netflix said it estimates that more than 30 million households in the United States and Canada use a shared password to access their content. The company said more than 100 million additional households are likely to use a shared password worldwide.

In a quarterly letter to the shareholder, Netflix acknowledged that it purposefully allowed generous password sharing outside the home because it helped users hook up with the service. But with Disney competition, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global, NBCUniversal, Apple TV + and other streamers that are eating away at its growth, Netflix said it wants millions of password-sharing households to start paying.

“Our relatively high penetration of households – when it includes a large number of households sharing accounts – combined with competition, creates barriers to revenue growth,” the Netflix letter said. “Account sharing as a percentage of our paying membership hasn’t changed much over the years, but, together with the first factor, it means it’s harder to increase membership in many markets – a problem that has been clouded by our growth at COVID .

Netflix reported a loss of 200,000 paid subscribers in the first quarter ended March 31 – for the first time in more than 10 years, Netflix lost subscribers in the quarter. The company estimates that it will lose 2 million more subscribers in the second quarter.

The streaming platform currently has 222 million subscribers worldwide. It enjoyed a boom in growth during the pandemic, but that customer growth slowed – and is now negative – as Covid-19 quarantines were largely lifted.

Netflix lives by sharing passwords because the company, in the words of co-founder and co-CEO Reid Hastings, is “doing well” without taking any harsh action.

“In terms of [password sharing]there are no plans to make changes there, “Hastings said in 2016. Sharing passwords is something you have to learn to live with because there is as much legitimate password sharing as sharing with your spouse and children. its …. so there is no bright line and we are doing well as it is. “

Netflix has built a user-friendly brand over the years, and allowing password sharing has helped with that image.

“Sharing has probably helped us grow by making more people use and enjoy Netflix,” the company said in a note. “And we’ve always tried to make sharing a member’s household easy, with features like profiles and multiple streams.”

But times have changed. And when growth stops, attitudes tend to change.

Earlier this year, Netflix began testing various ways to restrict password sharing in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru. Executives said in a call about the company’s earnings on Tuesday that it could expand the model it has unveiled in those countries by charging extra for accounts that share passwords outside the home.

Netflix has not yet outlined a specific global strategy, but suggests that global change may come as early as 2023.

WATCH: Netflix profits are a warning for streaming services

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of CNBC and NBCUniversal.