This article was taken from the July 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Reed Hastings is one of Silicon Valley's power brokers -- not just as CEO of Netflix, the video-streaming service, but through his board seats at Facebook, Microsoft and the Startup America Partnership. Netflix has grown to 47 countries, including the UK, since he founded the firm in 1997.
Hastings, 51, recently stopped by Wired's London office to discuss what's next.
Looking back 15 years, would you have done anything differently?
We would have started later. When we launched there were hardly any DVD players, so the first couple of years we just struggled. But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you're confident that you'll catch a bird flying by. It's an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn't come by, but a few times it does.
Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they'll turn out to be right. I'm on the Facebook board now. Little did they know that I thought Facebook was really stupid when I first heard about it back in 2005.
I thought, "Who would want to put their face on a website?"
What will be the next big disruption in entertainment?
Disruptors always look for an underlying change that they can take advantage of. In this case, it's fibre optic. Now, high-speed video links mean we have more options to create global video services.
Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, <span class="s2">that's what's happening now.
How will we be consuming media in ten years' time?
The next wave will be various kinds of pervasive computing where you've got wristbands, goggles and other devices that animate your experience. People will look back on our computer screen and keyboard and it will seem very archaic, like DOS might seem to us today. As that wave of pervasive and wearable computing grows, there will be whole new entertainment scenarios enabled by that technology.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
