Even the niche in India is bigger than most countries: Netflix CEO Hastings
NEWDELHI: Reed Hastings, chief executive of popular streaming service Netflix, is visiting India for the third time in two years. On Friday, the company announced three new Indian original series — and
— taking Netflix’s India originals to a total of seven, the highest number of shows commissioned by the service outside the US, UK and Japan.
The American streaming giant has earmarked a content budget for India on a short term basis. Hastings, who spends two hours a day watching Netflix, said the company will wait and watch for results before locking down further investment. In an interview, Hastings talks about subscriber growth, technological advancements and consumption habits in India. Edited Excerpts: is just 11%. India is growing, like international, but far higher. The number of shows that we have announced in India is bigger than in any other country but the US, UK and Japan. Well initially. We’re also mostly western content and mostly in English with some Hindi. So, we have got a number of limiters compared to Reliance Jio or Hotstar. So, it’s a good place for us to start. And then as we build up the shows that we are producing here in India so that we have content that’s more relative to world audiences then we’ll continue to expand. But for now its really aimed at people who have some interest in western content because that’s where we are so strong. And as with everything in India, even the niche is bigger than most countries. Yes, we have made great progress in these first two years. Both in developing the content relationships and commissioning shows as well as in membership growth. We recently changed the payments. When we first launched you had to have an international credit card to use Netflix. Pretty limiting obviously. Then we got the right relationships with RBI (Reserve Bank of India) and now we can handle all the domestic debit cards and credit cards. So big expansion in who can pay for Netflix. What we’d like to do is make the content so great that more and more Indians say that it’s of incredible value. Compared to movie tickets and Starbucks etc. it is great value.