Netflix’s Biggest Competitor Is ‘Sleep’ Not HBO or Amazon Says CEO

In every business, you have competitors. For streaming services, Amazon, HBO and Hulu are mainly seen as the major competitors of Netflix. However, Reed Hastings, the CEO  of Netflix seems to think otherwise.

Rather,  Hastings says: “He is not really concerned about Amazon and HBO because the market is just so vast. You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.”

He added the Netflix’s competitors are like “two drops of water in the ocean of both time and spending for people. And so Amazon could do great work, and it would be very hard for it to directly affect us. It’s just — home entertainment is not a zero-sum game. And again, HBO’s success, despite our tremendous success, is a good way to illustrate that.”

The news comes on the heels of Netflix adding nearly 5 million subscribers during the first three months of 2017 in almost 190 countries. Now reports reveal that the streaming services global subscribers will soon hit 100 million. In other words, what hastings is saying is that he is not losing over his competitors.

Regardless, Netflix still has a long way to go before it meets up with HBO. HBO has 134 million subscribers worldwide.