Whatever you do, never pooh-pooh the futuristic vision of Netflix chief Reed Hastings. People have gone broke doing that. Sure, Hastings just gave a Mobile World Congress keynote that sounded like it was co-written by Gene Roddenberry. But Hastings plans to take the Netflix Enterprise to the final frontier — no matter where that is — so Roddenberry makes sense.
Hastings said maybe Netflix will be streaming content directly into your contact lenses in the future. While so far Virtual Reality looks like the next big platform — and Netflix will be ready for it, too — you never know, cautions Hastings. If the platform ends up being contact lenses or something else Netflix will be there. It’s an equal-opportunity opportunist. Hastings says:
“If virtual reality takes off we’ll adapt to that. If it’s contact lenses that have powerful lenses, we’ll adapt to that.”
Again, never doubt Hastings, who was doubted when he tried to explain Netflix was deprecating its profitable DVD mailing business for some newfangled thing called streaming. Hastings knows what he’s doing. Still, the idea of Samuel L. Jackson sent directly to your eyeballs is intimidating.
