Netflix wants you to sleep less

CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings thinks the company is competing against our need for sleep. Picture: Craig Barritt

THE huge success of Netflix has led to a growing market of video on demand streaming services but the company isn’t too worried about competition from other streaming platforms.

In fact the company’s CEO said Netflix’s biggest competition is actually our need for sleep.

“You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep, on the margin,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said during an earnings call this week.

It’s not the first time the Netflix boss has been imaginative when considering potential opponents to his binge-watching empire.

Last year, he speculated about the potential emergence of a “pharmacological” competitor to Netflix and described a world where people can take futuristic entertainment pills to delve into a virtual world of their favourite shows.

“In twenty or fifty years taking a personalised blue pill, you just hallucinate in an entertaining way and then a white pill brings you back to normality is perfectly viable,” he said.

It goes without saying that Netflix’s desire for us to replace a bit of sleep with an extra episode of The Crown would have adverse effects on our health. But judging by a tweet from the company’s US account earlier this week, Netflix makes no apologies for its aggressive ambition.

Sleep is my greatest enemy.

— Netflix US (@netflix) April 17, 2017

The comments came as Mr Hastings spruiked the company’s growth projections despite missing its mark in the first quarter of this year.

“We have come to see these quarterly variances as mostly noise in the long-term growth trend and adoption of internet TV,” Netflix said in a letter released along with the earnings figures.

The streaming giant finished the first quarter of this year with 98.75 million subscribers and predicted that its ranks would crest 100 million this weekend.

“That is a bit accomplishment,” Mr Hastings said during a video briefing with analysts.

“We are super excited.” The company expected it would add about 8.15 million subscribers overall during the first half of this year as compared with 8.42 million in the same period in 2016.

Netflix shares dipped and then rose in after-market trades that followed release of the quarterly earnings figures, eventually gaining more than a per cent to reach $US149.25.

— With AFP

Tensions between Netflix and Hollywood are escalating after the streaming-video company was accused of making attempts to poach executives from Fox 21 Television Studios. WSJ’s Shalini Ramachandran joins Lunch Break and explains how Netflix is also expected to spend more than $6 billion on original and acquired programming this year. Photo: Netflix