It wasn’t all that long ago that Netflix stood beside LG before the press and spoke of their newfangled partnership, in which the first company would deliver the soft stuff (software and Web service) and the second would produce the hard (network compatible devices).
And it won’t be long before Netflix expands on its list of associates, according to Reed Hastings, the company’s CEO, who sat down for a chat with The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley for the paper’s latest Weekend Interview column.
Hastings laid out the company’s basic strategy going forward like this:
Netflix is about service. It’s not about anything tangible. (Though the mailers and the discs are a major component of the business’s primary function.)
Such diversification is certainly a sensible pursuit. While a company like Apple can focus its engineering efforts on creating the storefront-to-set-top-box- to-television-screen experience from scratch, Netflix may only excel best in the video download era by focusing most especially on the software side of the equation, and spread wide its holdings in the hardware arena by partnering with numerous manufacturers.
