Charlie Rose Talks to Netflix's Reed Hastings

May 5, 2011 at 9:00 PM UTC

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This article is part of the May 9, 2011 issue of businessweek.

Did you cannibalize your DVD business when you started to stream content to customers?
DVD has continued to grow for us. It's grown every quarter. It's been phenomenal. Eventually—in fact, maybe even this quarter—it will start to decline slightly for us. But it's been such a steady grower, it's been fantastic, and on top of that we've grown the streaming, and when you add the two of them together, that's what's helped make us so successful.

You've now got more subscribers than Comcast (CMCSA). How big is Netflix (NFLX)?
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. It's really on all of the devices. And it's not just Netflix, it's also Hulu, YouTube, all of the online video is experiencing an explosion in viewing because it's so convenient, the click-and-watch.