Netflix's Reed Hastings: Comcast Wants The 'Whole Internet To Pay Them'

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings appeared on Thursday at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. and he didn't back down from his company's increasingly public battle with media giant Comcast.

Netflix recently signed a paid-peering agreement with Comcast, a move which visibly frustrated Hastings as he discussed it on Thursday. He described Comcast as wanting to be "like the post office....a national monopoly." He told the audience that the experience for Netflix customers who used Comcast had continued to decline until the deal was signed. He said that one of the biggest consequences of the agreement was that nearly every other ISP now wanted a similar paid peering relationship.

Hastings explained that his primary disagreement with the deal was that he worried about the long-term consequences for the industry and for customers. He is concerned that the peering price would continually to rise as Comcast and the other major ISPs consolidated their industry. "The key thing is the principle," said Hastings. "They (Comcast) want the whole internet to pay them." He addressed Comcast's complaints that Netflix accounted for 30 percent of the Internet traffic. "We offered to pay 30 percent of the costs, if we received 30 percent of the revenue."

In other news, Hastings said Netflix has no interest in sports programming. He explained that live programming isn't a big part of the company's plans and that Netflix doesn't have the bandwidth or the money to compete for that audience.

Hastings also said that despite Netflix's ability to closely track viewer behavior, they wouldn't use the data to try and influence the direction of the company's original programming. He told a story about "House Of Cards," in which David Fincher was told how many people viewers had turned off the show in the first season after a scene in which Frank Underwood's character strangled a dog. "He said don't ever do that again," and Hastings said he thought that was a good stance moving forward.

Hastings also explained that Netflix has "no interest" in creating its own device, similar to Amazon's Fire set-top box. "There's no advantage to us doing a device." And in answer to a question from the audience, he admitted that Netflix's experiment with the Quickster DVD-only business was a "mistake" and that he was "arrogant." He believes that if Netflix had grandfathered current customers for two months it would have worked. "But that's not a mistake I'll ever make again."