Richard Greenfield, BTIG
What do you think of Sling TV? I mean a lot of people have downplayed it, what do you think of the offering and it’s impact on your business specifically?
Reed Hastings , CEO, Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX)
I don’t think we’ll see impact in our business. It’s a great start. Charlie Ergen’s a great entrepreneur and I think he sees the future that it is internet-centric and it may not be the perfect offering today but it’s got $20 a month, very attractive pricing. He’s been an incredible entrepreneur in terms with starting with something small, like with the early Dish and building it in to be the internet MVPD, so it’s great for him. It adds some competition in that market but I don’t think it materially changes the desire to have Netflix with our unique and exclusive shows.
Mark Mahaney, RBC Analyst
Reed, on the MVPD integrations in Europe, were any of those material enough to have caused some of the upside we saw in this tier guidance? It the December quarter or in the guidance for the March quarter?
Reed Hastings , CEO, Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX)
They are deals that we worked on for a long time so they were all built-in to the Q4 guidance.
Richard Greenfield, BTIG
Reed, you have not updated us on streaming metrics in a long time. I think Neil Hunt gave the last statistic almost a year ago in terms of where you are now on a monthly or quarterly global basis. Some color there and then just tied it up — we got a lot of questions emailed in in terms of just split where it stands today in terms of devices given the role of better wireless networks. How big is none in-home usage — on tablets and smartphones? Is there any color you could provide on movies versus TV in terms of absolute amount of absolute volume of streaming?
Reed Hastings , CEO, Netflix, Inc.
There’s been no remarkable changes so TV shows watching is bigger than movies, that’s been consistent. We said personal devices: PC, tablet, phone, that varies by markets, some 30, 40% of viewing, and TV-based viewing being a large screen shared being the majority of it. No particular change in those matrix.
In terms of mobile networks, consumers still in those countries are quite conservative because because of the data caps typically 2 gigabytes or 5 gigabytes in terms of watching video on. So we see a lot of tablet and smartphone usage but almost always on wifi networks and then they are careful about how they use the cellular networks because of the caps and the fear of overages.
Richard Greenfield, BTIG
And in total hours?
Reed Hastings , CEO, Netflix, Inc.
Total hours continue to grow. We haven’t hit any super sexy milestone that we’ve chosen to make an event about which is when we tend to do those things. But total hours, of course, that’s going up. But more importantly, median hours has continued to climb in every market as we make the programming better and better. So that’s the main thing we track internally and it’s just very exciting to see as the devices gets simpler to use, as the UI gets more personalized, as the content gets better — we see it directly reflected in the number of median hours and that net is the closest correlator with retention and word of mouth. Because if you are using Netflix a lot, you are much more likely to stay with us and to recommend it to your friends.
Richard Greenfield, BTIG
But that must mean neither closing in on kind of two hours per subscriber per day if you’ve been growing consistently on the median basis.
Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX)
Well I will leave that speculation to you and when we get to a great milestones — there’s a fair amount of seasonality so we might hit numbers like that in peak times like holiday periods but not necessarily sustain that over the whole year.
