Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has always shied from lashing out at competitors. Not this time round. In an interview with Wall Street Journal, the staid CEO said Amazon’s Prime video service “a confusing mess”. Hasting has maintained in the past that he saw HBO as a much bigger competitor in video streaming than Amazon Prime.
However, when Wall Street Journal asked him about Amazon Prime, he said, “In the U.S., our content budget is about three times [Amazon’s], and we’ve got about three times more content. And what our customers tell us is they want Netflix to have more content, not to have two-thirds less at a lower price”.
“[Amazon has its Prime membership service] and it’s really about low-cost shipping, but why is video in there? It’s kind of a confusing mess,” he added.
Hastings further went on to suggest how Netflix’s video recommendation algorithms are better compared to Amazon Prime’s. Unlike Amazon, Netflix focuses solely on building a video service, the CEO said.
Netflix recommendations, its user interface, the video playback feature and video queue management are some other exciting features of the leading video streaming service.
In the interview with Wall Street Journal, Hastings pointed out that apart from video streaming Netflix is also concentrating on growing its business by developing HBO-quality original TV content and pursuing international expansion.
