Netflix agreed to sell 0 million in stock and convertible bonds Monday in an effort to stockpile some cash. The filings were seen as the latest in a series of bad news for the company by investors, with shares down about five percent. But the raising of short-term funds raises the question of how well Netflix has been managing its cash, particularly as the company has seen customer additions stall at home, while investing heavily to expand internationally.

Netflix has already committed billions of dollars for new streaming deals over the next few years — which would be fine if the company had ample cash in the bank, or was still on an outstanding growth trajectory. Netflix finished the third quarter with just 6 million in cash and short-term investments, however, and with 0 million in long-term debt.

The company is hoping to bolster its international business with a planned launch of services in the UK and Ireland in the early part of 2012. So far,  Lionsgate, MGM and Miramax are on board for launch in the new market. This move follows Netflix’s international expansion in Canada and Latin America. Those deals are necessary to keep international growth going, but they come at a cost: For each new market Netflix has to pay upfront licensing fees for the right to stream titles before it actually launches there.

Meanwhile, the company embarked on a series of costly agreements for exclusive content — like two seasons of the upcoming David Fincher-Kevin Spacey project House of Cards and the return of Arrested Development, which will appear only on Netflix. Even when it’s signed up catalog titles from content owners like Disney or CBS, Netflix has been rumored to pay in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars for each of those deals. But few have asked how Netflix will actually fund those additions to its library.

It looks now like Netflix was betting on future domestic growth to help pay for its streaming library. But growth in its home market has stalled, thanks to a series of missteps that included a price hike and the announcement of a new DVD service called Qwikster, which Netflix later backed away from. That’s an unfortunate turn of events that senior management likely didn’t anticipate, and one that might have left Netflix in a bit of a cash crunch.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Netflix squandered cash through a series of stock buybacks over the last nine months, when it could have been hoarding cash for expansion. Instead, Netflix spent nearly 0 million on buybacks, at an average price of 2 a share — about three times the stock’s current share price.

This could be a temporary bump in the road, but Netflix will have to show some returned growth and financial stability in the fourth quarter, if it’s going to get investors back on board. It’ll also have to show that it can afford to pay the license agreements it signed over the past year, as it’s planned aggressive expansion both in new international markets and in its catalog at home.

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Netflix continues to invest in content that will help it stand out from the growing crowd of streaming video services and traditional cable TV networks. The latest evidence is a deal that will bring Norwegian-produced mobster TV show Lilyhammer to its original programming lineup. Speaking at the MIPCOM conference in Cannes, Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos announced the deal as part of a keynote discussion with Miramax CEO Mike Lang Monday.

Lilyhammer stars E Street band rocker Steven Van Zandt playing a mobster who agrees to move to Norway as part of a stint in the Witness Protection Program. The casting is reminiscent of Van Zandt’s last major TV role, in which he starred as Tony Soprano’s right hand man Silvio Dante on The Sopranos.

Lilyhammer was produced by Rubicon Tv AS for NRK Broadcasting in association with SevenOne International, but it will get its U.S., Canada and Latin America premiere on Netflix. The show’s dialogue is a mix of Norwegian and English, with subtitles to fill in for the other language, depending on where it’s shown.

The Lilyhammer deal adds to the amount of exclusive programming Netflix has invested in recently to differentiate it from other streaming services and cable networks. Earlier this year, Netflix announced an exclusive deal to bring the Kevin Spacey-David Fincher project House of Cards online to its streaming customers, committing to an unprecedented two seasons of the show. In doing so, it beat out traditional cable networks like HBO or Showtime.

Adding more original and exclusive content is one way Netflix is trying to appease a user base angered by a series of missteps which have lowered its customer satisfaction rating pretty dramatically. The bad news for Netflix began in July, when the company announced a change to its pricing that split its DVD and streaming plans and increased costs by as much as 60 percent for users who subscribed to both. Later, Netflix announced that it was separating the businesses altogether and rebranding its DVD-by-mail service Qwikster, which was also met with wide-scale disapproval.

Signing exclusive deals could also help replace some content that will disappear once Starz pulls its TV shows and movies from the streaming service early next year. In addition to Lilyhammer and House of Cards, Netflix has committed to an exclusive deal with Dreamworks Animation to license its movies in the pay TV window when they become available in 2013.

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While canceled on broadcast TV, daytime soap operas All My Children and One Life to Live will continue to live on online. Two-year old production company Prospect Park has struck a deal with ABC to license the shows and make them available for streaming on the web and on devices like connected TVs. But will TV audiences follow the soaps online?

The continued production of All My Children and One Life to Live will surely please audiences that tune into those shows daily. Both average about 2.5 million viewers, according to the Los Angeles Times, which is difficult to support on broadcast TV, but a huge audience compared to most web original series. But there’s still a question of whether or not the economics of online distribution might work for shows that migrate online.

For one thing, much of its audience will begin watching shows once they’re no longer available on TV? There’s also the question of budget — the LA Times notes that soap operas can cost up to million a year to produce, which is a pretty large sum for a web-only property.

It’s also not clear what strategy the shows will take for distribution: whether they’ll be made available direct to consumers on their own web properties, or — more likely — if they’ll be sold or licensed to distributors like Netflix to reach viewers on its website and connected devices. If so, All My Children and One Life to Live could be the first cancelled series to be “saved” by distribution on Netflix.

Going web-first or web-only is also a strategy that’s been taken up by a few high-profile projects in recent months. Netflix is licensing the new David Fincher-Kevin Spacey series House of Cards, for instance, beating major cable networks like HBO and Showtime to the punch. And Kiefer Sutherland’s web series The Confession, which premiered on Hulu, is already profitable, with plans for international distribution and DVD sales upcoming. So there’s hope that niche programs like daytime soaps can support themselves with online audiences.

Indeed, online distribution is increasingly becoming a way for networks, shows and even TV stars to reach viewers even if broadcast audiences aren’t large enough to support them. Here are some other examples of this happening over the past year or so:

• Al-Jazeera English has had a difficult time getting distribution on U.S. cable and satellite providers, but its live streams became indispensable for coverage of Middle Eastern uprisings earlier this year. Its streams are now available on a wide range of platforms, including Roku, Boxee, Google TV, PlayStation 3 and iPhone and Android mobile devices.
• Cable network WealthTV also struggled to find distribution, so it took its programming direct to consumers with a subscription-based Roku app, and it’s looking to launch on other platforms as well.
• When Glenn Beck’s contract ended with Fox News, he launched his own online-only subscription video network called GBTV.

Much of the discussion around soap operas going online has been about whether or not online audiences are large enough to attract the kind of revenue to keep the shows afloat, but wide distribution through multiple platforms — like Netflix, Hulu and even YouTube — might turn out to be the best way to ensure the shows are seen by as many viewers as possible.

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Everybody’s making noise about the upcoming Apple tablet, and who can blame them? It’ll certainly be an interesting device, but the thing is that nobody really knows what it’s going to be. Flat, to be sure, and tablet-shaped in all likelihood, but beyond that it’s pretty much anybody’s guess. Analyst-at-large Gene Munster has made a list of predictions anyway, since his job is to turn ignorance into money.

So what does he think you can expect? Sales, for one thing. Via a house-of-cards sort of logic peculiar to analysts like himself, he first determines the features, then the price, then the sales, then the revenue. Here are his nested prognostications, as summarized by Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech.

• Be similar to an iPod touch, only larger, capable of running most of the 70,000 applications on the iPhone App Store plus a new category of apps designed for the bigger screen.
• Will be used primarily for Web surfing, e-mail, and digital media, competing with netbooks without being a netbook.
• Will be priced between an iPhone and a MacBook — between $500 and $700.
• Is likely to include a 3G cellular modem and could be subsidized by a carrier — either AT&T (T) or Verizon (VZ).
• Will sell better than Apple TV did its first year (1.2 million units).
• Could in fact sell 2 million units at $600 each to generate $1.2 billion and add about 3% to Apple’s revenue stream in calendar 2010.

Now, I’m not saying he’s wrong on all these points (though, as Boing Boing Gadgets points out, his track record isn’t inspiring); in fact, they’re more or less in line with my own predictions. I’d submit, though, that the App Store thing is troubling. You’d expect some info would have leaked by now regarding how to program or adapt your apps for this thing. Since nothing has come out, it is implied that the tablet runs either iPhone apps or OS X apps natively (or both). I don’t think that’s likely, or even a good idea. After all, every app in the store is configured for an iPhone’s hardware. Innumerable compatibility problems could arise.

Most troubling of all is the fact that the iPhone’s screen is a mere 320×480; if the Apple tablet is at 1280×720 (my guess), it’s beyond the power of resizing and filtering to make these apps full screen or even reasonably large (not to mention the aspect ratio difference). And I doubt Apple would be satisfied with ugly little app “widgets” clogging up what will almost certainly be a serene and controlled user interface. I don’t have a solution for this, I might add… not my job. I’m hoping Apple does.

And as for the somewhat arbitrary prediction that Apple will sell 2 million units, I find it unconvincing. We heard from a previous analyst (who has actually seen the device, or so he claims) that all the other companies are just waiting for Apple to go so they can undercut and offer the same services. I think that unlike the full OS X (which I don’t think the tablet will run) or the iPhone’s OS (ditto), this tablet’s OS will offer fewer chances to innovate, though I have faith that Apple will throw a few curveballs in there, likely to do with elegantly implemented gestures. Still, 2 million units is a lot to ask for a completely new type of platform, in an economy when an entirely new price point below this one (and offering more functionality) has risen to prominence.

If I had to weigh in (and I don’t really), I’d say that it’s going to be a success, but will fill the same role in the upcoming tablet wars as the Mac fills in the PC wars: a luxury option. Perhaps in a year or two, we’ll be hearing how Apple sold 90% of the tablets costing over $700, but I don’t think it’s too far out to think that competitors like Asus, Dell, and our own CrunchPad will be doing a lot of selling too — higher volumes at lower price points, yes, but I think that’s appropriate for a tablet. We’ll have more on the phantom tablet as it develops, but feel free to make your own predictions.

So I just bought House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, by William D. Cohen, from the just-launched Barnes and Noble e-book store. Long story short, it works pretty well, but there sure as heck isn’t a hint of polish on this thing.

So here’s how it worked. I went to barnesandnoble.com, typed in the name “William Cohen,” then clicked “Read Now,” indicating that I wanted to buy the e-book version. It downloaded to my Desktop (well, Downloads folder). Then I had to download and install the reader software.

Nothing too hard. From the reader software, I then navigated to the .pdb file. A little window popped up asking me to enter my name and credit card number to unlock the file. And now I’m reading about Wall Street’s excess!

I even tried reading the file offline and it worked fine. So if you’re trying to read an e-book on the commuter rail on your laptop, without any Internet access, you should be OK.

For the thousandth time, I don’t have an iPhone, nor do I have any intention to, so I couldn’t test that. But, as far as the Mac version goes, it’s not too different from reading a PDF. And that’s not a bad thing.