Netflix's stunning growth phase in Australia appears to be over.  
Now it has entered a period of mere "steady" growth, and for investors, it's a problem.  
The streaming video company reported its quarterly results in the US this morning. Shares have tanked by as much as 10 per cent in after hours trading, after it forecast weaker than expected growth in subscribers in the current quarter - and it turns out Australia is a key part of that. 
Netflix said it expects to add 2.5 million subscribers globally in the   June quarter - 500,000 of them in the US, which is in line with previous quarters; but just 2 million in "international" markets -  down from 2.4 million a year earlier.   
The reason for the international slowdown? In a word, us.  
"Our international forecast for fewer net adds than prior year is due to a tough comparison against the Australia/New Zealand launch," the company said in its letter to shareholders.  
Last year's launch in Australia and New Zealand created a  "growth spike" that saw the number of new international subscribers more than doubling compared to the same period  a year earlier. But now "while ANZ is growing steadily this Q2, it is less than the launch spike last year," Netflix said. 
So there it is: Australians (and New Zealanders) love Netflix, it's just that a lot of us have already signed up to the service. Or to put it another way, Netflix's Australian launch last year went so well, it's finding it hard to replicate that growth here or in other international markets.  
When you consider how many Aussies were using Netflix before the official launch (via VPNs) then perhaps this is not terribly surprising. 
According to some estimates, Netflix has already has 1 million subscribers, in Australia. That kind of scale is enviable, but sometimes, for investors, steady growth is not enough. 
The other factor that seems to have spooked people is the threat of competition from Amazon.
The e-commerce giant announced this week that it would offer its Prime service in the US - which offers free home delivery for a vast array of products, with a streaming video service thrown in for free -  on a month to month basis, rather than the current annual subscription. It will also be possible now to subscribe to the Prime streaming service on its own, without the delivery option.  
Netflix acknowledged the groundswell of competition it is currently facing. 
"If you think about your last 30 days, and analyse the evenings you did not watch Netflix, you can understand how broad our competition really is. Whether you played video games, surfed the web, watched a DVD, TVOD, or linear TV, wandered through YouTube, read a book, streamed Hulu or Amazon, or pirated content (hopefully not), you can see the market for relaxation time and disposable income is huge, and we are but a little boat in a vast sea."
Investors would do well to not get too carried away by the savage sharemarket reaction to the result. Netflix is a high growth stock that is typically heavily "shorted", which means its shares tend to gyrate wildly every quarter when it reports results as traders rush to close out their positions.
The company's total subscriber base hit a new high of 81.5 million,  and while there are some risks with completing a price hike in the US, its plan to focus on developing its own original shows and conquer the globe seems to still be on track.