14 DAY TRIAL // In a roundabout way, Netflix revealed a very impressive stat, people watched one billion hours’ worth of video with the service in June for the first time. That's quite a huge figure, in fact, it works out at about one hour of video for each subscriber every day.
If that's not enough to scare cable companies, what is? People, i.e. the average American, watch several hours of TV every day.
If Netflix can now compare to the amount of time people spend with regular TV, it means that it is making a significant dent in hours spent watching via the regular cable providers.
"Congrats to Ted Sarandos, and his amazing content licensing team. Netflix monthly viewing exceeded 1 billion hours for the first time ever in June. When House of Cards and Arrested Development debut, we'll blow these records away. Keep going, Ted, we need even more," Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings wrote in a public post on Facebook.
Granted, cable providers are doing their best to keep Netflix at bay, either by artificially slowing it down, or by getting TV producers to withhold content from Netflix. But the internet streaming company is not taking it lying down.
As Hastings notes, things like House of Cards and the new Arrested Development episodes are in the works. And Netflix is funding several other exclusive shows.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. For now, cable companies and premium channels like HBO can boast that Netflix can't really afford to produce too many new shows, certainly not with the same budget as the big TV channels.
But that's a very shortsighted look, Netflix may not be able to afford it now, but it's working on it. And it's going to do more shows and more expensive ones. At the same time, price isn't everything, bigger budget does not equal a better show all of the time, even most of the time.