In what was probably a tongue-in-cheek joke but could easily foreshadow a new line of House Of Cards-branded energy drinks, Netflix CEO said that his streaming service is “competing with sleep.” In other words, it’s not Hulu or Amazon Prime that convinces people to stop watching Netflix, it’s the fact that they’ve stayed up too late and need to go to bed. Hastings dropped that line in a Q&A with Wall Street analysts, but according to The Hollywood Reporter, he did mention a video streaming service that he is concerned about: YouTube. Hastings said that Netflix “definitely” has “YouTube envy,” since it takes Netflix about a week to get the number of views YouTube can get in a day, and he says they’ve “got a long way to catch up to YouTube.”
The Q&A was primarily based around Netflix’s number of new subscribers in the first quarter being lower than estimated, and THR says the company pinned the blame on the fact that it premiered fewer new original shows and movies than normal. Part of that is because of the aforementioned House Of Cards, which got delayed from its original premiere date (possibly so Netflix could avoid looking too similar to the real-life evil president that had just been elected).
In other interesting facts, Netflix said that subscribers have spent “more than a half a billion hours” watching the various Adam Sandler movies that are available on the service, and Hastings acknowledged that financing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword Of Destiny instead of simply licensing it was actually a bad idea. So, he’s basically saying that everybody watches Adam Sandler movies and nobody watches expensive martial arts movies. Also, the Netflix Twitter account later joined in on the “competing with sleep” fun: