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.
Don’t get distracted by the shiny object [and if a crisis comes], execute on the fundamentals.
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.
On the Internet you get continuous innovation, so every year the streams are a little better.
Technological revolutions are very hard to predict. My favourite example is someone in 1850 taking care of horses as a farrier. They would have said, "Look, horses have been part of human existence for 5,000 years. We are horse people. It's permanent." But all of a sudden, the internal combustion engine comes along and, with it, oil fields and automobiles, which basically replace the horse completely. So we often have these long periods of stability and then a sudden inflection point.
I don't know of any Internet service that opens on a regional basis.
Our brand at Netflix is really focused on movies and TV shows.
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.
Interactivity is a big part of video games, which have been a big part of entertainment for 20 years. That's what we think of as a 'lean-forward' type of entertainment. It's much more intense. But TV is more of a 'lean-back' entertainment - so the big improvement there is on-demand, because it conforms to your schedule.
If you look at cable networks, they almost always start licensing content wherever they can, so they can build a subscriber base. But then they start doing their own content; it's a pretty well-trodden path.
Not every show has to work equally well. It just has to work better than any competitor because then we can outbid for the content.
Something will eventually replace the Internet. But it's hard to know what and when it will happen.
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.
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.
I watch mostly independent films.
In the U.S., HBO is a very aggressive service.
I'm on the Facebook board now. Little did they know that I thought Facebook was really stupid when I first heard about it back in 2005.
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.
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?'
But it may be one of our best markets in the long term because when the Japanese society embraces a brand it is a very deep connection, so we're willing to make that investment knowing that it's not the quick route to success that might be in other countries.
What's got me excited about the education space is the growth of the Internet over the next 10, 20, 30 years.
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.
I'm an HBO subscriber, and I watch a bunch of great shows on HBO.
I hate the photo shoots. I hate all that stuff.
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.
