Netflix Chief: We'll Keep Pace With Technology

Charlie Brooker, who produced "Black Mirrors" for Netflix, speculates in the British television series about the future of technology, including contact lenses that contain all the world's information.

Original content like "Black Mirrors" has become one of the streaming company's crown jewels, which now boasts about half of U.S. households as subscribers.

"If virtual reality takes off, we’ll adapt to that," said Reed Hastings, CEO and co-founder of Netflix, during an interview at Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona. "If it becomes contact lenses that have amazing powers, we’ll adapt to that."

In addition to contact lenses that could stream content, Hastings spoke about binge viewing, artificial intelligence (AI), the availability of original content in most countries except for China, and Internet television that requires a strong bandwidth signal.

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"Ten or 20 years from now, all the video you view will be on the Internet and one slice will be from Netflix," he said."In 20 years, you're starting to get into some serious AI," Hastings said. "Over 20 to 50 years, there's a lot of debate about what happens to humanity. Do we get augmented? Does pure AI take on humans?"

The idea behind the original content is to give local producers a global audience of nearly 100 million members, more than half are international.

In 2015, Google announced its ambitions to make "smart" contact lenses. Shortly after the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office granted Google a patent describing a method for manufacturing the lenses.

The lenses aren’t being used to stream entertainment content, but rather monitor glucose levels. But who can predict the  variety of application for Google's smart content lenses. 

1 comment about "Netflix Chief: We'll Keep Pace With Technology".
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  1. Perry Bax from Mixdown Productions, February 28, 2017 at 4:58 p.m.

    How about just starting with the rental Blu-Ray discs not being downgraded from Dolby Atmos or DTS:X to the now practically ancient Dolby Digital 5.1 and get with the program and do the same with streaming. Dolby Digital "Deluxe" 5.1 doesn't make me even remotely interested in streaming anything besides Netflix original programming. Get tough with the studios whom I am sure are the culprits regarding the ancient audio and the removing of "extras" for rental while trying to boost sales.
    Then get all pie eyed about AI contact lens viewing. If you don't get people interested in quality by giving them a taste, how on earth do you expect them to keep up with the hardware demands that any of these changes will demand.

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