Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is very excited about the customer engagement levels for his company.
During a Q&A session on April 15 to discuss the company’s first-quarter results, Hastings noted the period’s massive customer viewing numbers.
“And what’s great about the viewing is if you look two years ago in this call, we said it was 4 billion hours in the first quarter and over those two years, we have gone from 4 billion to 10 billion hours of viewing,” Hastings said, according to Seeking Alpha. “And so you can see along with our membership growth, we are also having engagement growth, which given all the new competitors, improving television, is really impressive that Netflix is growing not only the subs, but engagement also.”
Netflix’s subscriber base is more than 60 million.
“We have continued the focus on the same things over the last couple of years, improving the content, improving the streaming, improving the user interface,” Hastings added. “And we have seen the rewards of that in 
continued growth. I think this quarter, in particular, we had some amazing original content with Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, with House of Cards, with Bloodline. And so all of that compounded to really push us forward and certainly what you are seeing is all of Internet TV growing. The attention of the new launches of the competitors is only creating a bigger ecosystem, drawing more and more people into thinking, ‘Hey, I have got a check that out and try this Internet TV thing.’’’
Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer and Vice President of Content, Netflix noted that the company’s diversity of programming is evident.
“If you look at just what’s coming up next quarter with our first original documentary series called Chef's Table from the director of Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” he explained. “We have got a third season of Orange is the New Black, which is a global sensation that will break in June, our comedy with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda called Grace and Frankie that we are really excited to show to the world. Sense8, I think will show everybody what global TV series can really be like, filmed on location in nine cities around the world, spectacular scale and scope of a theatrical film. And even original series for kids with How to Train Your Dragon 2. So we are super excited about both the volume and the quality and the diversity of everything we are doing in our original programming next quarter.”