Netflix is about to get a lot more interesting. I am positing a theory — or to quote Woody Allen, I have a notion that I’m thinking of turning into a concept and then maybe later into an idea — and that is that on demand entertainment is the future. Save for cable, network television has become mostly a wasteland. With new TVs being easily able to connect to wi-fi for, say, Netflix streaming which costs practically nothing and allows you to watch any movie or TV show any time without censoring or ads. Most of the teenagers I know don’t watch TV, they watch Netflix. It’s taking us oldens longer to catch on. Right now, it’s mostly wide open for original programming. David Fincher and co are about to change that. With House of Cards set to debut — the possibilities have just busted wide open.
From what I gather, the series will be on Netflix to watch all at once; you won’t have to wait a week to see the next episode but I could be wrong about that. Here are some trailers. I can’t wait to devour them all in one day. Fincher directs the first three and the rest of them are directed by various others.
I am not sure that Netflix will be the last man standing at the end of the day – streaming content is becoming more and more expensive ($350 million annually), other content providers don’t wish to grant exclusivity or want to run their own services (ie: HBO) and original programming is a) expensive and b) risky (plus “young” people can’t just torrent the content without paying as subscription fee). It remains to be seen whether house of cards and arrested development will bring in more subscribers which Netflix desperately needs to make the disney math work (estimated to be 3.7 million annually).