• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, November 6, 2015

I wonder how much successful people credit the odd misjudgments of their competitors to explain their success. I’d guess that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings does. A lot of Netflix's success was based on everybody else's inaction.

According to Fierce Online Media, at the recent Dealbook Conference, Hastings told BTIG Research analyst Rich Greenfield, that at Netflix, “we've always been most scared of TVE [TV Everywhere] as the fundamental threat -- that is, you get all this incredible content that the ecosystem presents now on demand for your same $80 a month. And yet the inability of that ecosystem to execute on that for a variety of reasons has been troubling."

I don’t know if Hastings meant to say “troubling.” I think he might have wanted to say “fortunate.” 

Cable networks and cable operators mounted clumsy marketing and informational campaigns that prevented TV Everywhere from taking off until long after other online video sources--namely Netflix--had a nice firm hold on laptops and smartphones. 

Sometimes the combined aptitude of powerful sources--TV station owners, networks, studios and advertisers--is nothing to brag about.

Hastings didn’t mention it, but another balky feature is cable’s on-demand, a television function that has often been so painful millions of people would rather watch Hulu.

It’s improving now, but in the meantime, DVRs (with that nasty ad-skipping function) and Netflix got such a firm head start CBS research chief David Poltrack once said he wished he could figure out a way to just get rid of them.

The amazing thing is, he said that a month ago at Advertising Week and by now half the nation’s households are hooked to a DVR.  

“Had video on demand worked out, we would never have had DVRs, and we would not have had the issue of commercial skipping,” Alan Wurtzel, the NBC Universal research chief told Variety.  And mainly the reason it didn’t happen can be blamed on multi-corporate lethargy and the idea nothing in the TV world was really going to change. 

Well, guess what? It changed.

Not too long ago, ABC, Fox and NBC’s corporate parents almost sold Hulu before, nearly too late, discovering that they might be presiding over a pretty damn hot property.

The uncertainty over what to do about online video has so plagued the old established media companies that they’ve given Netflix, and a handful of savvy YouTube multi-channel networks lots of legroom to spread out. It’s only now that some studios (owned by the networks) and producers have figured out that selling rights to TV network hits to online purveyors might be diluting their first run and overall value.

There were enough missteps entrenched media made--and continues to make--that leaves a relatively comfy path for Netflix.

"The big system has to figure out TV Everywhere to get relevant for the Internet," Hastings said. And mind you, he’s saying that at the same time subscribers are trying to discover any way out of their cable contracts. You know that barn door that was left open? That horse has already galloped  away toward a new horizon.

pj@mediapost.com