Netflix CEO Reed Hastings discusses the future of television

Traditional television will be dead in a decade or two, but what’s going to replace it? That’s a question that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings answered in-depth at the Media Convention in Berlin last week. According to Hastings, television will turn into an app-based ecosystem that will completely replace traditional television within the next twenty years or so. 

Imagine turning on your 60” iPad-like screen and clicking on an app when you want to watch TV. Want to watch the latest NFL game? The NFL-dedicated app will let you tune in live and watch the action in high definition. Would you rather watch The Big Bang Theory? Just navigate over to the CBS app, where you’ll find the latest episode streaming in real-time. How about Grey’s Anatomy? ABC’s dedicated app has that. Online video streaming is the future of TV, according to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in a talk he gave at the Media Convention in Berlin last week (seen below), and he thinks this app-based streaming TV ecosystem is coming in our lifetime. Hastings gives linear TV – broadcast or cable — a 20 year expiration date as Internet video has an “astounding” amount of innovation. “Sometimes I say that linear TV is like the fax machine,” he said. “That, in the ’80s and ’90s, the fax machine was amazing. But then you started attaching files on documents and the fax machine was not so amazing. And linear TV, it completely transformed society.. but now there’s something better: Internet TV.”