They won't. Their days are numbered.
Building the future is hard and it's messy. Netflix has been taking it on the chin this year as they've passed through a really rough patch.
In the end, though, I'd put money on Netflix existing in 2020 before I would any given broadcast network. TV is dead.
Netflix is trying to redefine distribution. They're not going to win by placating the dinosaurs of distribution's past. If the Arrested Development deal works out, production companies may see that they have new options for financing their projects and might get better opportunities to reach an audience than they'd ever get on TV.
So it's simple: take the issue by the balls and control your destiny or bow and scrape before moronic suits who don't understand technology, hoping and praying that they won't change their minds each time a licensing deal expires.
Netflix's streaming isn't more innovative and Google's streaming or Amazon's streaming. Netflix's advantage used to be to get people DVDs cheaply and quickly. That's not an advantage to take them into the future. Unless they can find a way to stream movies cheaper than Amazon I don't see how they can survive as an independent.
I think Microsoft should buy Netflix and B&N to compete with Apple, Amazon, and Google in the tablet/content space. As an independent company they are dead in the water.
EDIT: fixed typos
Netflix has very little cash in comparison to it's competition. I'm glad they are trying to remain distinctive and keep innovating but any of their competitors can simply buy a studio and do the same thing.
It's possible Netflix sees the future by becoming like a TV channel but for the internet. And have people pay a monthly price to view this TV channel. Some other content producer would be another channel. I don't see this model working out. Rather, I see producers selling their shows to content distributors like Amazon, Apple, and Netflix and letting them fight over subscribers. If this is the case then Netflix has no advantage.
> fibre accounting for half of all broadband connections in Japan (55%) and Korea (52%). Other leading countries include the Slovak Republic (28%), Sweden (24%) and Denmark (12%).
http://www.telconews.com/2010/12/11/oecd-internet-economy-br...
Someone is going to have to deal with the question of live sports coverage, somehow, before this can happen.
I consider it a solved problem. I bet more of the big sports leagues would _love_ to cut out the middle men and monetize viewership more directly somehow (like NBA league pass and MLB.tv are).
The NFL is pretty much the trend setter in the sports world when it comes to media. They were the first to figure out the right way to do a TV deal back in the early 70s, the first to start their own network, etc. It's only a matter of time.
It has a 2-tier price system. At the lower price, you select up to 7 teams to watch; to get all 30 teams, you have to pay a little bit more.
It's not a perfect system, but it's getting better.
The hope, I suppose, is that future TV deals will decrease to the point that the leagues realize that they can make more money by just distributing it all themselves. That's seems to be what they are setting up at least, but the short term they are making so much money off of TV licensing.
The NBA All-Star game has been shown online for the last few years and it's a better experience because you can choose from four cameras (one of which was following a single player, very cool). That part of the technology is awesome, but I suppose you'd have bandwidth problems at a large enough scale.
What's going to be interesting is when both real-time rendering and motion capture get good enough to serve as a vehicle for live sports. Imagine being able to put the camera anywhere you want, or on anyone you want. That will kill TV sports if nothing else does in the meantime.
Alternatively, ESPN could stream (and should! Could you imagine if they got the ad money directly for the Super Bowl??? I bet ESPN would be licking its chops for that kind of money)
And I think the thread they're picking up with AD is perfect -- just imagine all of those long-lost fan favorites like Firefly, AD, and now Community getting picked up and streamed on Netflix in a climate where the show's creators are at least theoretically given freedom from network meddling (not to mention the much more realistic "ratings" that would be possible like this). I may even pay for that, and I almost never watch TV and generally hate it, but if Netflix cultivated all of the great content that the mainstream networks regularly threw away, they'd definitely have a much brighter outlook.
The problem I see potentially arising out of this is the conflict of interest for cable companies as online streaming continues to override cable TV viewership. With Netflix picking up shows that had initially been considered by premium cable networks like HBO or Showtime, how much interest will Comcast have in keeping pricing for internet access out of the ridiculous ranges and varied pacakges of cable television?
This is what the future will be - then somebody just needs to figure out how to get Netflix, Amazon et al to work together so that consumers don't pay multiple subscription fees.
This is why the Netflix stock price went so high - because so many analysts wrote reports about how Netflix is new media, and it may well be.
tl;dr networks = dead