Rich Fiscus
29 May 2008 1:19
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings believes streaming video, which is already bundled with their popular DVD rental plans, represents the company's future. At an investor conference in San Francisco he said he considers online video delivery to be a long-term business model which will ensure the success of Netflix following the decline of DVD rentals, which he sees peaking within the next 10 years.
“The market that can be reached through streaming is much larger than DVD,” said Hastings, who didn’t give a specific timeframe for the anticipated growth, but did say “We should be able to get well beyond 20 million subscribers.” He added “We named our company ‘Netflix’ and not ‘DVD By Mail’ for a reason.”
This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's followed the company's recent move toward providing internet connected set-top boxes. In January Netfilx began allowing subscribers with plans for 3 or more DVDs at a time to stream an unlimited amount of video from their Instant Watching service. Since then they've also announced deals with consumer electronics manufacturers to provide set-top boxes to work with the service. Just last week the first such device, manufactured by a company called Roku, went on sale.
Hastings is counting on these set-top boxes to connect millions of Netflix customers' TVs to the internet by the end of next year. It would seem he's on the right track since the journey from internet to TV has arguably been the biggest hurdle online video providers have faced to date.
Unfortunately the other big problem, a lack of popular content, can't be addressed quite as simply. Although Netflix already offers more than 10,000 titles for streaming, but if you're looking for anything recent or popular the selection remains limited to say the least.