As a masters student exploring artificial intelligence at Stanford University almost 30 years ago, Reed Hastings no doubt had an eye on where the future might take him.
But of all the scenarios he imagined for his career, it’s highly unlikely that any of them included the one that unfolded this past week: strolling the red carpet in the south of France, rubbing shoulders with some of the country’s most glamorous actors and actresses, and fielding questions about his role as a global media kingpin.
It’s a future the CEO of Netflix says he couldn't even have predicted five years ago, when the company was still primarily shipping DVDs to customers in the U.S. while grappling with its emerging video streaming service. Even now, the Internet continues to scramble the game so fast that Hastings said his company is racing to keep up with all the changes.
When asked, he didn’t even want to hazard a guess as to where Netflix might be five years from now.
“We don’t really know,” Hastings said. “It’s not Netflix that’s making the changes. It’s the Internet. We’re figuring out every year how to use the Internet to make a great consumer experience. Every year is an experiment.”
Hastings and Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos spoke with VentureBeat over lunch in Marseille, where they arrived this week to host a premiere gala for the company’s first original French-language series. The show, “Marseille,” made its global debut on May 5th, when the first season was made available around the world on Netflix.
The show is part of Netflix’s massive bet on original content, a strategy that it believes is one of the keys to its future. And as with most of the company’s emerging strategies over the years, this one has investors alternating between praising Netflix and fearing that it’s doomed.
But at that particular moment, sitting in a seventh-floor restaurant that offered an impressive panorama of Marseille’s Old Port as a backdrop, it was hard to believe that Netflix faced any serious threats. Rather, the setting seemed to convey the global influence Netflix now wields, an impact that has taken it far, far beyond its Silicon Valley roots.
Hastings and Sarandos plan to take it even further. Earlier this year, the company expanded by 130 countries, bringing its total to 190. While 47 million of its 81 million subscribers are in the U.S., Netflix wants to reach the same level of adoption internationally.
“We’d like to be as popular in the world as in the U.S., to be in one-third of households seven years from now,” Hastings said.
