Oh, Really Reed

Jeesh, Reed Hastings, you can really f-up a situation can’t you?! WTF man, as if the whole recent Qwikster debacle wasn’t bad enough, you get the opportunity to clean things up a bit in Sunday’s New York Times interview puff piece with you and you utterly screw that up as well.

Ok, fair enough, you suck at what might be the most important part of your job – public relations, but you did make a pretty cool service. I’ve been willing to forgive you, all along, and I’m still betting your stock will rise, against most pundits in the film world, but… you finally lost me today.

Andrew Goldman, the NYT interviewer, comes down pretty hard on you in the interview. He asks some tough questions, and finally gets to the meat of his argument when he points out that not only is your streaming collection woefully inadequate compared to your DVD selection, but that you’ll be losing your Starz deal soon, which includes Disney content such as Toy Story 3. What can cushion the blow (to his son) of losing Buzz Lightyear? he asks. Your response:

“I watch mostly independent films. I’m not in that particular demo. I’ll send you a list”

Oh, Really Reed. That’s your answer?

So, you defend your current crappy situation by appealing to indie film? That’s pretty ironic, isn’t it?

If you love indie film so much, why do you keep cutting the deals you give to indies? It’s an open conversation these days that you’re not renewing scores of indie film deals. It’s an open secret that outside of a few select indie aggregators, you’ve never paid that much for them in the first place.That’s fine, it is a small market, but don’t act like that’s why you don’t know – as the CEO of a publicly traded company whose very popularity hinges on being a repository of just about all films, indie and Hollywood – some better answer to the question. Jeesh. Yeah, I’m Reed Hastings, so f-ng busy watching indie films that I didn’t realize we’d be losing Toy Story 3, and don’t know why anyone would care.

So, do you really love indie film, or was this your publicist’s brilliant strategy for deflecting the criticism? I can almost hear her/him: “If they ask about Starz and Disney, say you watch indies and don’t know about that. No one watches indie films, but they have stellar street cred. It’s almost like pulling out a f-ing puppy, you become criticism/bullet-proof. People love to support indie films in spirit, but no one watches enough of them to actually call your bluff and point out that our indie selection is decreasing as well. It will be brilliant.”

But it’s not.

Luckily for you, your real customers – the majority – care about Real Housewives and other shows they couldn’t figure out how to DVR, so they need them streaming on demand. Your core customers, the ones you built your business on and who watch indies and classics and obscure titles, don’t realize that you’ve shifted your tactics and these titles are slowly disappearing. Your competitors can’t figure out that having 10K crap titles can’t compete with a mixture of good big/small content (and can’t afford to license it). You can be comfortable in your ownership of this space. You don’t need to change anything. You don’t need to listen to your core customers. You don’t need to listen to anyone. You’ll just do whatever you want while people continue to pay up.

Nope, no need to be strategic here. Once you’re the big kid on the block, who is going to disrupt this situation?

Oh, wait. I’ve heard this story before. This might actually get fun pretty soon.