Top 68 Quotes & Sayings by Reed Hastings - Page 2

When you grow up, as I have, in the shadow of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and others, success is defined as the total global transformation of a market. To achieve that, you need low prices and an attractive offering. It's about trying to make a positive impact on a big scale.

When we think about online learning, it's such 'early days.' Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like,'Who's every going to need more than 640K of memory?'

Interactivity is a big part of video games, which have been a big part of entertainment for 20 years. That's what we think of as a 'lean-forward' type of entertainment. It's much more intense. But TV is more of a 'lean-back' entertainment - so the big improvement there is on-demand, because it conforms to your schedule.

Something will eventually replace the Internet. But it's hard to know what and when it will happen.

If you look at cable networks, they almost always start licensing content wherever they can, so they can build a subscriber base. But then they start doing their own content; it's a pretty well-trodden path.

Technological revolutions are very hard to predict. My favourite example is someone in 1850 taking care of horses as a farrier. They would have said, "Look, horses have been part of human existence for 5,000 years. We are horse people. It's permanent." But all of a sudden, the internal combustion engine comes along and, with it, oil fields and automobiles, which basically replace the horse completely. So we often have these long periods of stability and then a sudden inflection point.

Not every show has to work equally well. It just has to work better than any competitor because then we can outbid for the content.

But it may be one of our best markets in the long term because when the Japanese society embraces a brand it is a very deep connection, so we're willing to make that investment knowing that it's not the quick route to success that might be in other countries.