As a part of his company’s earnings webcast today, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said that he thinks that Netflix and Amazon Prime complement one another in the internet video arena.
The two companies compete with one another, but in much the same way that there are multiple channels available on TV, Hastings believes that there’s room for both Amazon and Netflix in the world of online video streaming.
“(Amazon Prime is) coming across to most people in our societies as very complementary to Netflix. People look at them as multiple channels. You saw that Amazon included us on the Fire TV, and of course we’ve been before on the Kindle Fires.
It’s a great relationship all around, where we’ve got unique content, they’ve got some unique content, they’re also doing originals. There’s multiple networks out there. It’s very much not a zero-sum game, and we’re building this ecosystem together that’s internet video. And the more players they are in internet video, the bigger that ecosystem gets. The big theme is that Internet video is taking share away from linear video. And so we’re all participating in that transformation.”
That echoes some of Hastings’s past statements about Netflix’s competitive outlook: he usually chooses to benchmark the company against HBO rather than competitors in the streaming space like Amazon and Hulu. In some ways, traditional video providers have more to fear from Netflix than the company’s internet-based competitors do: streaming services offer consumers a way to watch TV shows without having a cable or satellite subscription.
It’s also a positive sign for people who still want to see their favorite Netflix shows on Amazon devices like the Fire TV.
Further deepening their ties, Netflix is a major Amazon Web Services customer, streaming its content from Amazon’s cloud.
While the two companies will almost certainly be competing with one another to offer different and better content, it doesn’t seem like Netflix would want to pull its content from Amazon’s hardware any time soon. In the short term, Netflix subscribers can look forward to using the Fire TV’s voice search functionality to find Netflix shows “later this year.”
Hastings’s statements come the same day that the company announced it plans to increase the price of its service for new customers by up to $2 a month, depending on what country they reside in. That price change will once again make a year of Netflix streaming more expensive than a year of Amazon Prime, though Hastings wouldn’t say if his company’s price hike was related to Amazon’s pricing changes.
Check out the full webcast below:
