Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Reed Hastings Is Just Like You — He Complains About the Cable Guys on Facebook

Last fall, Reed Hastings took to Facebook to field his customers’ complaints. Now he’s using Facebook to complain to Comcast.

Here’s a screenshot of the Netflix CEO’s most recent post, where he gripes that Comcast won’t let its subscribers watch HBO Go — the pay channel’s “TV Everywhere” app — via an Xbox 360, and goes on to talk about the way the cable provider enforces its broadband usage cap.

Both of these complaints are the kind of thing that most people don’t care about, but vex a certain kind of technically savvy user. They are important, though, because they underscore some of the tensions between programmers and providers that have made “TV Everywhere” more conceptual than it ought to be, nearly three years after Time Warner and Comcast announced a grand launch plan.

Still, this is one of those stories where the form matters more than the content — it’s just interesting to see the head of a public company handling company business on Facebook. Then again, Hastings happens to be on Facebook’s board of directors.

Also note that Hastings doesn’t just gripe about Comcast on Facebook. Here he is a couple days ago, praising the company’s new Xbox app, and complimenting/wooing Comcast executive Sam Schwartz. And then he gripes, just a tiny bit, about Streampix, Comcast’s sorta-kinda Netflix-killer.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”