What's holding back the largest online movie streaming platform from reaching billions of people instead of the estimated 100 million it has now?
Sleep, says Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
“You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night,” he said recently. “We’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.”
Sleep is my greatest enemy.
— Netflix US (@netflix) April 17, 2017
Though he doesn't have any answers, yet, on how to combat its greatest evolutionary competitor, Hastings went on to reassure everyone that the company is doing just fine, even setting the stage for what we can expect out of the future of the most popular destination for bored college kids.
He says downloading for offline viewing (a feature newly offered on the platform), while nice to have now, is probably going to be obsolete soon. It's just not the direction the culture is going.
“As networks get more modern, I think, we’ll see that downloading, the need for it will go down and down, because basically you want to be able to just click and watch," Hastings adds. "You don’t want to have to think in advance outside of a couple of narrow scenarios like an airplane.”
Though until he and his billion-dollar company starts offering company-sponsored baggies of blow with every subscription, we'll stick to getting a little shut-eye every so often even if it means we have to hold tight on what happens to that Norman kid on Bates Motel for just a few more hours.
Man that kid's weird …
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