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RH Reed Hastings On Masters of Scale

“Like we realized, it took a long time, that we could be distrusted, we could be disliked, but we can never be boring. That the essence of an entertainment brand is to be thrilling. Like you just can't ignore it. You got to participate.”

Masters of Scale · Startups & Venture · October 2026

“Like we realized, it took a long time, that we could be distrusted, we could be disliked, but we can never be boring. That the essence of an entertainment brand is to be thrilling. Like you just can't ignore it. You got to participate.” — Reed Hastings, Masters of Scale

Context

Kara Swisher asked what Netflix should do now that YouTube is taking a growing share of viewing time. Hastings, a co-founder who has just left the board, answers with what he sees as the core idea of an entertainment brand.

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Transcript

Masters of Scale Around 08:53 into the episode
Reed Hastings

No, entertainment has very different brand properties. I would agree. So we want to be where you relax.

Kara Swisher

Sports is another area.

Reed Hastings

You know, for me, I think the strategy is doing more and better television shows, more and better movies. I think they are broadening. Becca, you said there's the podcast. There's some cool things like Alex Honold, you know, climbing this tower in Taipei. You know, this very gripping sort of things that are thrilling. So the core brand property is about being thrilling. Like we realized, it took a long time that we could be distrusted, we could be disliked, but we can never be boring. Okay. That the essence of an entertainment brand is to be thrilling. Like you just can't ignore it. You got to participate. So that's what I think they're very good at is trying to be more and more thrilling.

Kara Swisher

So when you're like that, how do you compete with a YouTube? Because the numbers are really quite jarring, 14%. I know both my kids and you have kids similar ages. That's where they get all their information from is YouTube. And they like Netflix. There's no question they use, and they use my…

Reed Hastings

Well, see, if you look in the beginning of television, 1950s, 1960s, movie viewing went way down because suddenly there's this new hot object, television. And then movies got a lot better in the 1970s. There was a whole creator revolution in the pacing and the realism. And then movies fought back…

Kara Swisher

Yeah. But how do you make that, you know, thrilling? Like in the new age, again, do you have to be short? Do you have to be snappy? Is that the only thing? I

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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“I'm not sure that's the best way because … if we go down that path as we are, there will be incidents that happen and hopefully they're not too awful, but you don't know. And then there'll be regulation. … We tend to wait till something happens. And then think of the global financial crisis 2008 and then a whole bunch of new regulations come in. So that's the likely case here, unfortunately.” — Reed Hastings, Masters of Scale “53% of the traffic on the internet today is non-human. There's so much of the AI companies that have gotten money. So, what do they do? They scrape. When they scrape Rappler or any other news group, your server costs go up. So, I'm literally paying for someone else to steal our content, and they're doing it.” — Maria Ressa, Masters of Scale