CinemaTech's notes from Reed Hastings' panel at Web 2.0 Conference

CinemaTech has very good coverage of the 'The Future of Entertainment' panel discussion at the Web 2.0 conference, in which Netflix CEO Reed Hastings participated. It took place Thursday afternoon, October 6.

“Why won’t Hollywood give us any of their content to play with?”

That was the major theme of yesterday’s “Future of Entertainment” panel at the Web 2.0 conference. Techies are eager to experiment with new ways of delivering content that will make consumers happy. But TV networks and Hollywood studios aren’t just reluctant to offer up their content for experimentation -- they’re often prevented from doing so by the long-term licensing agreements that underlie today’s business models.

Some notes:

- Hastings used Movielink of an example of how reluctant movie studios are to license their content for experiments in new ways of delivering movies. Even though Movielink is owned by the studios, “it only has about 600 titles from the studios, and another 1000 from other firms – out of a universe of 50,000 to 100,000 [total] titles,” Hastings said. By simply buying DVDs, Netflix doesn’t have to jump through the same contractual hoops that a company like Movielink does, trying to obtain new rights for Internet delivery that don’t conflict with those of existing rights-holders.

- Hastings...feels that NetFlix will eventually start delivering movies over the Net. “I’m more optimistic on bandwidth. If you could delivery [content] at night and cache it [on a home server, like a TiVo], you could actually get very high bandwidth, delivering multiple hours of high-definition to the home. It wouldn’t be real-time television. But for NetFlix customers, it’d be an improvement if they could get something in 12 hours [via the Net] instead of 24 hours [delivered through the mail.]

- A questioner from the audience asked Hastings “what’s going on with the TiVo/Netflix deal?” Hastings said, “The fundamental issue isn’t technical. It’s really licensing. Traditional media companies, like TV channels, have exclusive licenses on much content. Even the studio-owned distribution service, Movielink, has a tiny fraction of the total content, and it’s not because they don’t want it.”

“Consumer expectations are extremely high,” Hastings continued, “They want iTunes for video. Unfortunately, it’s going to be many years before that happens – but it has nothing to do with technology.”

Read more from CinemaTech. Also see Artific Industries' blog which has notes about the same session, with a different take on some of the remarks.