Reed Hastings's Quotes

There's a finite market for DVD-by-mail, and the growth over the next 10 years will be in streaming.

Think of Internet on the TV like the Web browser. The amount of time you spend on the PC in the browser is just going to grow continuously.

We are seeing the beginning of things. Web 2.0 is broadband. Web 3.0 is 10 gigabits a second.

What's got me excited about the education space is the growth of the Internet over the next 10, 20, 30 years.

About half my work in education is U.S. political reform around school districts and charter schools, and creating more room for entrepreneurial organizations to develop. And about half on technology, which I look at as a global platform.

Comparing Apple to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges, especially if the oranges made so many mistakes that people stopped eating oranges and just went back to Blockbuster.

I founded Netflix. I've built it steadily over 12 years now, first with DVD becoming profitable in 2002, a head-to-head ferocious battle with Blockbuster and evolving the company toward streaming.

In fact, technology has been the story of human progress from as long back as we know. In 100 years people will look back on now and say, 'That was the Internet Age.' And computers will be seen as a mere ingredient to the Internet Age.

In the States, there's ESPN3, and each country has different options, and other than premiere league football, there tends to be very little global content. And movie and TV rights are pretty broad content.

It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.

Most companies that are great at something - like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores - do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

So much of the downstream revenue is linked to that initial excitement, to how much revenue is produced in the domestic box office. For example, what we pay for a film three years later is highly correlated to how well it did in the box office.

The Costa Rican government is prioritizing laying fiber optic over paving roads. Costa Rica is trying to become one of the Internet societies. This is happening throughout the world.

We have a very wide range of content, but the brand-newest movies, what's happening with those is a $30 pay-per-view option - not from Netflix but from DirecTV and others - of movies that are in the theater.

Well, we're about 24 million subscribers today, and that's up from about 15 million a year ago, so it's a very high rate of growth, and that's what's exciting about the business - more and more people are getting smart TVs, they're watching Netflix on their iPads.

When we think about online learning, it's such 'early days.' Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like,'Who's every going to need more than 640K of memory?'

At Netflix, we think you have to build a sense of responsibility where people care about the enterprise. Hard work, like long hours at the office, doesn't matter as much to us. We care about great work.

But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you're confident that you'll catch a bird flying by. It's an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn't come by, but a few times it does.

Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that's what's happening now.

Broadcast TV is like the landline of 20 years ago.

Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.

How much has it been your experience that Americans follow what happens in the world?