He’s full of good will, too! No surprise: The Netflix CEO has always tried to present his company as an ally to Hollywood and the TV guys. So everything should be cool from here on out, right?

The reality is that the studios and TV networks aren’t quite sure what to do about Netflix: They’re happy to take Hastings’s checks, but they’re worried he’s using the money to disrupt their businesses.

So let’s hear Hastings make his case in his own words, via an interview I conducted with him on Tuesday. That’s a day before Bewkes made his latest comments about Netflix and other Web video services. But I don’t think Bewkes said anything that would have changed Hastings’s answers.

I used my time to focus primarily on Hastings’s approach to the TV business, but we touched on some other topics as well, including his take on competition from Amazon and Hulu.

Alas, right after I finished up with Hastings, I realized I had forgotten to ask him about Apple’s new subscription rules and what impact they would have on his Web service. I tried following up, but it was too late: Hastings, via a PR rep, declined to comment.

Here’s an edited and condensed transcript from our talk:

Peter Kafka: There’s been a lot of rumbling from Hollywood about slowing down your growth by delaying or cutting off your access to content, and Time Warner has been the most vocal about this. What happens if they follow through?

Reed Hastings: We license only a small part of our streaming content from Warners today, and we hope to be able to license more as we go. We’ll see what their perspective is on it. But we’re doing great, even though we haven’t licensed essentially any Time Warner streaming content.

But beyond streaming, they could make it much harder for you to distribute their DVDs, too. You have a distribution agreement with them now, but it will expire this year.

Discs I think we should set to the side, because we’re mostly focused on streaming. And on streaming we only license a few shows from them today. It’s a very tiny amount.

And [because they're] not licensing to us, they’re missing out on a lot of revenue, and we’re putting that revenue into their competitors. We spend a lot of money with News Corp. We spend a lot of money with Viacom. That’s a choice that they’re making.

Do you think Jeff Bewkes is more concerned about your impact on his Warner Bros., or his HBO pay channel?

I’m not sure. You’d have to ask Jeff that.

I ask because in the ongoing cord-cutting/cord-shaving/cord-nevers debate, there seems to be a growing consensus that services like Netflix are most competitive with premium TV like HBO.

We compete with HBO like baseball and football compete. We sell to the same person, we deliver some of the same emotion, but it’s not direct competition. People subscribe to both. And the people who love us often subscribe to HBO.

They don’t have any of the same content we have, and we don’t have any of the content they have. So it’s a pretty indirect competition for time and money.

How many Netflix subscribers also have HBO?

The last time we checked was a couple years ago. It was about a third.

Again, there really isn’t a direct competition. We’re creating this new market where consumers get to choose what they want, and it’s on demand, and it’s a very different experience.

In your last shareholders letter, you specifically referred to competition from Amazon and Hulu Plus. Do you think those are your two biggest threats?

What we said is that they’ve entered the market in the last year, and that we’ve continued to prosper and grow.

You’ve been focusing more energy on acquiring TV programs. And while you keep saying you’re not interested in providing TV shows the day after they air, like Hulu does, many people think that’s what you’ll do sooner or later. How do you look at TV programming?

TV content on DVD was about 20 percent of our viewing. And on streaming it’s about half. The difference between “Terminator” 1, 2 and 3, and episode 1, 2 and 3 of a TV show is not that large. We’ve always been consistent that movies and TV shows are what we do, and we haven’t changed.

We’re not focused on same day [TV shows], because what we really want to do is spend that money on prior. You can buy two or three prior season shows for the price of a same day show. You can get same day on cable, satellite, pretty easily.

What about when you have more money? Would you get into same day then? Or do you always want to be an archival business?

I wouldn’t call it archival. [Comcast CEO] Brian Roberts’s phrase was “rerun TV.” And there’s a lot of great reruns, because you might not catch everything when it’s new and fresh. At least for the next five years, we’re really focused on that rerun model on television, and the pay [TV window] model on movies. And we have our global expansion, which we’re putting a lot of money and time into.

But you are paying for the first run of “House of Cards,” and possibly other shows. That seems like you’re edging closer to premium content.

We like premium content. We just did a big deal licensing “Glee,”and a big deal licensing “Mad Men.” And “House of Cards” is similar except that it’s premiering on Netflix.

So it’s a little bolder and a little riskier than other shows, but we’re not really in the original content business. We didn’t create that content, we didn’t find the script, we didn’t put the cast together, we didn’t talk Kevin Spacey into it. And it’s a small part of what we do, as a test.

If it works, will you build out a staff to find more of this stuff, or develop it?

If there’s a market of buyers, then those shows tend to get developed. We’ll take it year by year and see what happens.

We tried an experiment a couple of years ago with Red Envelope entertainment, where we bought films out of Sundance and similar festivals. And it was very fun, but we lost $10 million, and then we stopped. So we’ll see what we find.

So you don’t see yourself producing originals in the way that HBO does?

Very unlikely, especially given my background. What we’d prefer to be is the buyer of prior season, or expired season, like an “In Treatment.” Or have all the episodes of “Dexter.” We think if we focus on prior season, we can help build audience for current season.

Speaking of expired season, I’ve heard some networks talk about extending the life of shows they were going to cancel if you’re going to pay them to keep going. Does that make sense?

Yes. For example, “Friday Night Lights” wasn’t going to get continued two seasons ago on NBC, and DirecTV did a deal to extend that show. So we can see ourselves doing something like that–extending a season of something that was doing well on Netflix.

Showtime says shows it is still airing, like Dexter and Californication, will no longer be available on Netflix. The move comes a few days after Netflix announced it would pay for first-run rights to House Of Cards — the kind of show you’d normally expect to see on Showtime or Time Warner’s HBO.

UPDATE: You could argue, if you were so inclined, that Showtime’s pronouncement is a negotiating position, and not a finalized deal point, because the two companies are still negotiating a deal, and that it’s possible that shows like “Dexter” will still be available when negotiations conclude.

Which is more or less what Netflix is saying.

Here’s Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey’s statement in response to the LAT piece:

We’re really not sure what they’re saying, because Netflix and CBS announced a licensing deal, which included “The Tudors” and “Sleepercell.” “Californiacation” and “Dexter” are currently available to watch instantly streaming from Netflix as they are part of a separate licensing deal with Showtime. Netflix has a good relationship with CBS Corp. and we are in the process of renewing and adding shows from their many programming channels, including Showtime.

The cable shows are particularly noteworthy, since those programs are generally not available on Netflix rival Hulu–which is co-owned by NBC, along with Disney’s (DIS) ABC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox.

In fact, while Netflix makes a point of not advertising access to any particular show or movie on its service, it does consistently well with cable programming, at least compared with Hulu. For instance: Episodes of “Dexter,” from CBS’s Showtime pay channel, do particularly well on Netflix–but CBS has no Hulu deal at all.

And it’s also worth noting that, going forward, all new episodes of “Saturday Night Live”–one of Hulu’s best assets–will be available the day after they air. Just like they are on Hulu.

But the deal could also give Les Moonves and company the ability to strike less conventional distribution deals, too. Now that Comcast is out of the way, CBS could move forward with a Hulu deal, and perhaps the likes of an Apple TV product as well.

Make no mistake: The real focus of today’s deal is the money Comcast will fork over for the right to distribute CBS’ broadcast programming to its cable subscribers’ TV sets. Comcast and other cable guys have resisted paying the so-called retransmission fee for TV that’s available free over the airwaves. But one by one, they’re conceding and paying up, which means their customers will, too.

Barclays analyst Anthony DiClemente guesses Comcast’s CBS fee will start at 50 cents a month per subscriber and move well past $1 by the end of the deal, though I’ve heard grunts and murmurs from Black Rock that those numbers are low. Perhaps we’ll hear more during tomorrow’s earnings call.

And while the release announcing the deal notes that Comcast (CMCSA) gets online rights as part of the pact, the near-term impact for Web viewers will be very limited.

Specifically, if you’re a Comcast cable subscriber who pays for Showtime and/or The Movie Channel, you’ll soon be able to watch programming from those channels online, too. Good news for “Weeds” and “Dexter” fans, but that’s about it.

That said, down the road, CBS may start moving to a model where it pulls more of its broadcast TV shows like “CSI” off of the free Web and makes them available only to “authenticated” customers–Comcast subscribers and anyone else whose pipe provider has a deal with the broadcaster.

And that, in turn, gives the network the go-ahead to move forward with Hulu, Apple and every other player who also wants to sell online access to TV programming.

CBS had previously chatted with other outlets like Apple and Hulu–in part because it was interested, and in part because it was good for Comcast to know that it was interested. But now it has a framework for those deals: Comcast is paying us this much money for this much access to our shows. You’ll need to pay that amount or more.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise to see Moonves acknowledge his interest today in joining Hulu’s paid subscription service, which would mean patching things up with former online rivals News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, Disney’s (DIS) ABC and GE’s (GE) NBC.

And I wouldn’t be shocked to see him murmur positive things about supplying online programming to Apple (AAPL), or Google (GOOG) for that matter, during tomorrow’s call. Stay tuned.

For YouTube, which has been struggling to monetize the 330 million visitors coming its way each month, this may be the beginning of the business model that has so far eluded it. That said, the company is going to have to offer those visitors a bit more than grainy “MacGyver” reruns if it hopes to prevent them from turning to Hulu for premium long-form video content.

For YouTube, which has been struggling to monetize the 330 million visitors coming its way each month, this may be the beginning of the business model that has so far eluded it. That said, the company is going to have to offer those visitors a bit more than grainy “MacGyver” reruns if it hopes to prevent them from turning to Hulu for premium long-form video content.