Netflix’s CEO wants Linear television to extinguish

Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings in an investor call today reiterated his belief by confidently saying that Netflix was in a great place because linear TV would be dead in “5 to 10 years.”

Netflix needs linear TV to die because it needs the streaming holdouts still using linear TV. According to its 2022 Q2 earnings report, It made a whopping 1.3 million subscribers across the US and Canada in the last three months.

According to The Verge, with more than 220 million paying customers worldwide, it’s essentially found as many subscribers as it’s going to. It’s making efforts to gain subscribers: it’s got its incoming ad-supported tier (which won’t include all the content you get now), and it’s going to try and end the practice of account sharing—forcing sharers to subscribe or go without streaming to any screen bigger than a laptop.

“But when you’ve basically got as many subscribers as you can currently, you need your competitors (linear TV, YouTube, TikTok, the great outdoors, etc.) to do worse. So yes, of course, Hastings wants linear TV to kick the bucket,” a source as per The Verge.

On the other hand, Broadcast TV is also about to get a major upgrade in the form of ATSC 3.0. While its rollout has been glacial, the new standard for broadcast television assures all kinds of quality improvements that streaming charges a premium for. ATSC 3.0 supports 4K, and 120 frames per second, a wide color gamut, and HDR.