Normally I’m not one to tell of impending doomsday tales and other nonsense. It more often than not ends up being nothing buy hype and fear mongering. But the type of doomsday I’m talking about today isn’t for the human race. Instead, it’s about Netflix.
Netflix has been a widly popular movie rental service for many years now. While other traditional brick and mortar stores such as Blockbuster have been having red ink stained year after red ink stained year, Netflix has somehow maintained to grow, despite their business model still relying more on physical media. Is that reliance going to be the death of them?
Now I realize that the iPhone and iPad are hardly the universal norm, far from it in fact. But the rate at which the iPhone in particular has grown as well as the amount of mobile apps and data consumed show that consumers want plenty of rich content on the go. The iPhone/iPad and many other mobile platforms offer a housing for such content. Many publishers, producers, developers, and so on are getting on board with the mobile revolution as people spend more and more time away from traditional desktop computers and spending more time interacting with mobile devices — everyone except Netflix.
In response to Wednesday’s iPad announcement, Netflix CEO stated that “iPad and iPhone streaming are not a current priority”. He goes on saying that while they’re not working on anything right now, it is something they’re looking into for future expansion. Um, hello? The time to “look” was back in 2007 when the iPhone was released. Now into 2010 its way past late.
To recap, I’m not saying that everyone and their mother needs to support the iPhone and Apple. What I’m saying is that Netflix in particular and any media company in the modern world needs to embrace the mobile sphere of technology. Keeping your company in what they know and what is currently doing good, getting caught up in a “if it’s not broken don’t fix it” way is a dangerous trap. Such thinking has over the years led to countless companies withering into obscurity and eventually dying out.
It’s almost impossible to think about or rationalize now, but, could Netflix become the next Blockbuster? Are they turning into the very same company that they conquered in years past?
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