Netflix’s CEO is ready for linear TV to die - The Verge

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said linear TV would be gone in 5 to 10 years. This isn’t the first time he’s said it, or the last. But that outlook might be flawed.

Netflix wants linear TV to die. CEO Reed Hastings has been banging the TV murder drum for more than 8 years now, and in the investor call today, he reiterated his belief, confidently saying that Netflix was in a great place because linear TV would be dead in “5 to 10 years.”

Hastings is financially incentivized to say this. One of the biggest competitors for the largest streaming service on the planet is the set of totally free streaming channels that beam into any TV with an antenna, and their costlier friends on cable TV.

Netflix needs linear TV to die because it needs the streaming holdouts still using linear TV. It shed a whopping 1.3 million subscribers across the US and Canada in the last three months, according to its 2022 Q2 earnings report. With more than 220 million paying customers worldwide, it’s essentially found as many subscribers as it's going to. It’s making efforts to gain subscribers: it's got its incoming ad-supported tier (which won’t include all the content you get now), and it’s going to try and end the practice of account sharing—forcing sharers to subscribe or go without streaming to any screen bigger than a laptop. But when you’ve basically got as many subscribers as you can currently, you need your competitors (linear TV, YouTube, TikTok, the great outdoors, etc.) to do worse. So yes, of course, Hastings wants linear TV to kick the bucket.

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But is it really going to happen? TV viewership numbers are down, that’s absolutely certain. After the increased amount of original content on cable TV came in the 2010s, the market fragmented, and the power of the broadcast TV stations waned. Grey’s Anatomy continues to be one of the most watched shows in the United States despite going from an average of 20 million viewers per episode to... four million.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/19/23270669/netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-linear-tv-die

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