There’s no questioning the impact of streaming video these days.
If you watched anything on Netflix last month, then you helped the digital streaming giant reach a new milestone – a billion hours of streamed video served to users in one month. Company CEO Reed Hastings made the announcement in a Facebook post.
It’s unclear how far over the billion-hour mark the site went last month, but it probably just barely crossed the finish line.
Still, there’s no discounting the magnitude of that kind of achievement. This means that the average Netflix user consumed an impressive 1.5 hours of content from their streaming account every day in the month of June.
This comes after Netflix announced earlier this year that it streamed 2 billion hours of instant video in Q4 2011.
But that was over a three-month period. Hastings also posted high hopes for the site’s future, writing in a public note to chief content officer Ted Sarandos, “When ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Arrested Development’ debut, we’ll blow these records away. Keep going, Ted, we need even more!”
The site of course went through a massive PR nightmare and customer exodus last year when it decided to increase prices across the board, and planned to separate its DVD- and Blu-ray-by-mail service into a separate entity.
The latter decision was later axed, but the seeming lack of any sort of appreciation for its subscribers made Netflix on damage control for months. It looks like now, though, the company has fully recovered.
