I watched this interview with Reed Hastings on Business Week online from August 19. In it, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, says the threat of Amazon.com entering the online DVD rental market in the U.S. is diminishing as time goes by, because they're not having big success in the U.K. where they've been operating an online DVD rental business since last year. Hastings says Amazon is 4th in the U.K., behind Video Island, Lovefilm, and Blockbuster, and their DVD rental business is only $5 million out of $8 billion total for the company, so Amazon is not focusing on it very much.
Hastings also says HD-DVD will extend the life of DVD by about 5 years.
He intends for Netflix to be a leader in the VOD business, which will start out very small until more content comes available.
He intends for Netflix to change the movie distribution business, but in order to have the power to do that, Netflix must have enough subscribers (10-20 million).
By "change the movie distribution business," I think he means turning it into video-on-demand.
Click here for the Real Player feed of the 13-minute interview.
I think Netflix would use their clout to get studios to release more content for video-on-demand, not DVDs.
ReplyDeleteUsman is right. Netflix believes it can find larger audiences for less mainstream films by applying it's personalization technology to a large subscriber base. Netflix has little interest in accelerating the transition to VOD. It will compete in that realm, and try to win, but the company is not as strongly positioned there.
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