Netflix’s CEO is ready for TV to die.

Linear television should not be phased out.

Netflix wants linear television to perish. For more than 8 years, CEO Reed Hastings has been hammering the TV murder drum, and on today’s investor call, he reinforced his stance, firmly stating that Netflix was in a terrific position since linear TV will be dead in “5 to 10 years.”

This is something Hastings is financially motivated to say. The collection of completely free streaming channels that beam onto any TV with an antenna, as well as their more expensive companions on cable TV, is one of the greatest challenges to the world’s largest streaming service.

Netflix needs linear TV to disappear in order to keep the streaming holdouts who still watch linear TV. According to its 2022 Q2 earnings release, it lost 1.3 million customers in the United States and Canada in the past three months. With over 220 million paying consumers globally, it has virtually found its maximum number of members. It’s making an attempt to acquire subscribers: it’s getting an ad-supported tier (which won’t have all of the stuff you get today), and it’s going to try to put a stop to account sharing by asking sharers to subscribe or forego streaming to any screen larger than a laptop. But, once you’ve gotten as many subscribers as you possibly can, you need your competitors (linear TV, YouTube, TikTok, the great outdoors, and so on) to do worse. So, of course, Hastings wants linear television to die.

But will it actually happen? There is no doubt that TV viewership is declining. The rising amount of original material on cable TV in the 2010s fractured the market and weakened the strength of broadcast TV stations. Despite dropping from an average of 20 million viewers per episode to… four million, Grey’s Anatomy remains one of the most watched series in the United States.

However, broadcast television is still… you know… free. You do not need to pay for internet and then a membership charge (or 12) on top of that. Turn on your TV and, if you have a decent enough antenna, you can get lots of fantastic stuff – the content that Netflix is desperately trying to duplicate on its own service. The Office, Friends, Grey’s Anatomy, and the whole CW lineup of adolescent dramas were routinely among Netflix’s most popular shows before licensing deals forced them to go to other platforms.

Broadcast television is also going to undergo a significant update in the shape of ATSC 3.0. While its implementation has been slow, the new broadcast television standard promises all kinds of quality upgrades that streaming costs a premium for—if it can give them at all. ATSC 3.0 enables 4K resolution and 120 frames per second, as well as a broad color gamut and HDR. Netflix presently charges $19.99 a month for that, and HBO Max has been so sluggish to implement 4K that I often wonder if it even understands what 4K is.

Furthermore, nearly none of the major streamers have succeeded to replicate one of linear TV’s most calming features: the entire linear showing of material things. A never-ending stream that you may tune in and out of at your leisure and use as peaceful background noise in your daily life. Instead of something as easy as the option to create Netflix playlists, I get an app that forgets I began Persuasion the night before.

Linear television is failing in comparison to Netflix. But how is linear TV going to vanish when streaming is still plagued by difficulties and fails to compete in the hyper-popular content space? It appears that streaming is chasing after linear TV and saying, “Die already.” But if it dies within the 5- to 10-year span desired by Reed Hastings remains to be seen.