Netflix Inside
It's everywhere—on your computer, in your Xbox 360, backed into your TV. Now CEO Reed Hastings wants to let you watch every show and movie ever made—instantly.
WIRED magazine
October 2009 (17.10) issue
By Daniel Roth
It had taken the better part of a decade, but Reed Hastings
was finally ready to unveil the device he thought would upend the
entertainment industry. The gadget looked as unassuming as the original
iPod—a sleek black box, about the size of a paperback novel, with a few
jacks in back—and Hastings, CEO of Netflix,
believed its impact would be just as massive. Called the Netflix
Player, it would allow most of his company's regular DVD-by-mail
subscribers to stream unlimited movies and TV shows from Netflix's
library directly to their television—at no extra charge.
The potential was enormous: Although Netflix initially could offer
only about 10,000 titles, Hastings planned to one day deliver the
entire recorded output of Hollywood, instantly and in high definition,
to any screen, anywhere. Like many tech romantics, he had harbored
visions of using the Internet to rout around cable companies and
network programmers for years. Even back when he formed Netflix in
1997, Hastings predicted a day when he would deliver video over the Net
rather than through the mail. (There was a reason he called the company
Netflix and not, say, DVDs by Mail.) Now, in mid-December 2007, the
launch of the player was just weeks away. Promotional ads were being
shot, and internal beta testers were thrilled.
But Hastings wasn't celebrating. Instead, he felt queasy. For weeks,
he had tried to ignore the nagging doubts he had about the Netflix
Player. Consumers' living rooms were already full of gadgets—from DVD
players to set-top boxes. Was a dedicated Netflix device really the
best way to bring about his video-on-demand revolution? So on a Friday
morning, he asked the six members of his senior management team to meet
him in the amphitheater in Netflix's Los Gatos offices, near San Jose.
He leaned up against the stage and asked the unthinkable: Should he
kill the player?