Netflix reveals its biggest competition is sleep
For a company that relies upon and makes a profit from your constant activity, it shouldn't be a surprising revelation that Netflix's CEO Reed Hastings says it's not Hulu, Amazon or YouTube that are huge rivals to the company, it's sleep.
Read more: Netflix now offers offline streaming to fulfill all our binging needs
It makes sense since the average person should be getting eight hours of shut-eye, which results in you (and millions of other)pausing usage of the site. “You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night,” Hastings said. “We’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.”
Sleep is my greatest enemy.
— Netflix US (@netflix) April 17, 2017
As for all the other streaming company's, Hastings isn't scared they'll take over or even come close to rivaling Netflix. “We're like two drops of water in the ocean, of both time and spending for people,” Hastings said. “And so Amazon could do great work, and it would be very hard for it to directly affect us. It's just—home entertainment is not a zero-sum game. And again, HBO's success, despite our tremendous success, is a good way to illustrate that.”
So the next time you want to hit pause, remember Netflix will thank you if you power through “one last episode.”
Netflix is currently close to surpassing 100 million global subscribers.
