Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings, confirming what his critics have said for months, conceded his company "got overconfident" this year and moved too fast to get its customers to stop ordering DVDs in favor of online streaming.
He also said his company sometimes pays too much for its content.
"Our big obsession for the year was let's not live and die with the DVD," Hastings said Tuesday in an interview at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York.
Earlier this year, Netflix introduced a new pricing scheme and did away with its $9.99 plan that let users watch an unlimited number of movies online and rent one DVD at a time. Now, subscribers who want that combination will have to pay $15.98 a month — $7.99 for Netflix Instant streaming and $7.99 to receive discs in the mail.
That led more than 800,000 subscribers to cancel the service and caused a multibillion-dollar drop in Netflix's market value.
"It turned out to be a little too fast," Hastings said, adding that Netflix took an image beating similar to the one that Bank of America got for trying to charge monthly fees for use of its debit card. Ultimately, he said, this will be forgotten in a few years when streaming content becomes the primary way people view content.
"Streaming is the future," he said.
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