Reed Hastings is a humble type of bloke and often takes to his social channels to announce stats and figures but also give credit where credit is due. For example he absolutely loved John Oliver’s section on Net Neutrality which is on his new HBO show shown every week. Breaking records it seems every week Netflix is on course to become, quickly one of the biggest communities online dominating downstream traffic and surpassing 40 million subscribers across the globe.
Hastings took to Facebook earlier today to announce another milestone albeit it ‘minor’ one in Hastings mind. The announcement is more beneficial to investors rather than the average watcher of Netflix but one which is sure to have a positive knock-on effect heading into the future. The Facebook post read –
Minor milestone: last quarter we passed HBO is subscriber revenue ($1.146B vs $1.141B). They still kick our ass in profits and Emmy’s, but we are making progress. HBO rocks, and we are honored to be in the same league. (yes, I loved Silicon Valley and yes it hit a little close to home.)
This is astounding news given the timelines of both companies and how quickly Netflix has matured into, most likely the highest grossing content provider in the world that doesn’t use traditional advertising as its source of revenue.
In this post you can see Reed Hastings honesty when it comes to the original content offerings from Netflix which are while good not as intriguing or a popular in modern culture as say Game of Thrones or vampire series True Blood. The progress he hinted at is referring to the two emmy nomiated series exclusive to Netflix Orange is the New Black and Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards which are both looking to head into their third seasons in 2015. Hopefully his hints there means that’ll we’ll be getting announcements soon of brand new original content to complement the current roster of content.
It will also bring into question some of the third party content which many of our readers are often commenting on. With this increased revenue how much will we be seeing spent on great content such as a movie library worth watching, latest seasons of shows like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy to name but a few.
