Monday, February 01, 2010

Reed Hastings of Netflix: It's Not The Number of Titles, It's The Stream

New TeeVee has a nice piece this morning regarding Netflix as it adds more and more indie titles to its catalog of offerings to its subscribers.Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix says that the 100,000 titles catalog is not a good barometer for the company's success. To him, success equals the number of streams going out:


Instead of looking at the streaming service’s title count, Hastings urged analysts to think about how many of Netflix’s users are streaming video to determine how successful the service is. Netflix said on the call that about 48 percent of its subscribers used the Watch Instantly service in the fourth quarter, compared to 41 percent in the third quarter and 28 percent a year ago.

“What you really want to ask is, ‘When are we going to have two-thirds of our subscribers streaming? When is the content so good that two-thirds of our subscribers choose to stream?’” Hastings said. “The answer to that question for you, I would guess about one and a half years, just based on current trends of what we have seen growing.”

1 comment:

Jon Molly said...

Seems pretty obvious. Having 100,000 titles is meaningless if no one is watching any of them. The CEO talks about having two-thirds of his customers using the watch now feature within two years. But I'd bet dollars to donuts that he's really interested in how long he has to wait until his physical DVD stock becomes obsolete.