Rich Fiscus
6 Feb 2008 23:54
According to Netflix Chief Financial Officer Barry McCarthy, his company's current business strategy is still firmly rooted in DVD technology. Speaking at the Thomas Weisel Partners Technology, Telecom & Internet Conference in San Francisco he talked about some of the reasons Netflix is so sure DVDs are still the most important way to distribute movies.
“There are 100 million DVD players in U.S. households,” McCarthy said. “If you really think people are going to stop renting DVDs, you need to lie down until that thought passes.”
He also talked about the barriers to establishing a mainstream online video system. He said that the main problem right now is that content needs to be available on a wide range of reasonably priced set-top boxes. He also said it would need to be an "open" system, mentioning Amazon's Unbox service as an example of a current system that's "closed."
He did, however, mention what may be a step from Netflix to open their own Streaming service, called Instant Watching, to Apple users, who are apparently supposed to be able to use the service from their Macs before the end of the year. Until now the (Microsoft) DRM used for the videos has made it incompatible with OS X.
Netflix started this year with an announcement that they're parterning with LG to make a Set-Top Box designed to work with Instant Watching.