Could Netflix hit 50M subs in 2014? In a word: Yes

This week is a good one to be a Netflix (NFLX) shareholder: Its earnings report showed 1Q earnings per share topped estimates (31 cents versus consensus 20 cents), revenues came in on target ($1.02 billion for the quarter), and earnings guidance for the second quarter is, in the best case scenario, nearly 50 percent above guidance.

Oh, and there’s that subscriber “thing,” the metric that shows Netflix added 2 million streaming subscribers in the quarter to its U.S. base and now has 29.17 million on its books, that’s up 5.76 million from a year to go, or nearly 25 percent. Take that out another year, and it’s not unreasonable to see Netflix with 37 million U.S. subscribers by the end of 1Q2014.

Internationally, Netflix is still getting its feet wet. Nonetheless, it saw a 57 percent increase in subscribers from a year ago, closing the first quarter with 7.14 million in Canada, Latin America/Caribbean, U.K./Ireland and the Nordics.

Netflix hit the 1 million-subscriber milestone in the U.K. and Ireland after less than eight months, and the way the cards are currently falling in the U.K., it could see an even faster acceleration of uptake in 2013. Consider: IHS is forecasting a collapse of the DVD video rental market in the U.K. in 2013—down as much as 22 percent—as

half the country’s Blockbuster video stores shut down in a restructuring initiated by the company’s new management. The forecast from IHS suggests 2013 will show the sharpest annual decline in the market for the 11-year period from 2007 through 2017. A year ago, there were 530 Blockbuster stores in the U.K.; IHS sees only 264 surviving by the end of 2013.

“The year 2013 is set to become a watershed for the U.K. video rental market as a result of the wholesale closure of Blockbuster U.K. stores,” said Tony Gunnarsson, senior video analyst at IHS. The result, he said, will be a “radical transformation of the U.K. video market overall.”

While the decreasing availability of physical media in the U.K. will provide another boost for Netflix—and other—online content providers, it’s not the only way the company will see more subscribers in Europe. The company this week said it would be entering another European market in 2013.

It will be a huge year for the company, with international subscriber numbers potentially topping 12 or 13 million by 1Q14.

That means the company could have as many as 50 million subscribers a year from today.