Netflix CFO Bullish On Bitcoin Payments

It’s not unlikely for bitcoin to come up as a topic at a conference titled 2016 Internet, Media and Telecommunications Conference.

But what is a little unlikely is a CEO of a major company giving indication that it may be open to bitcoin payments. Well, unless you’re Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne.

But at the conference, Netflix CFO David Wells was asked about the concept of bitcoin and accepting bitcoin as a payment method on the video streaming site. This question was raised in relation to Netflix’s presence in Latin America, where the company has reportedly had payment integration issues.

But as payments evolve, he noted, so could Netflix’s ability to accept more nontraditional payments.

And that’s where bitcoin came into the mix.

“We’ll see where we go from here in the next 10, 15 years from a payments perspective, because countries still want to hold on to their monetary policy. But [it] sure would be nice to have bitcoin, in terms of a global currency, that you could use globally,” Wells was quoted as saying at the conference.

Of course, the CFO didn’t go as far as saying the company actually has or would have plans for enabling bitcoin payments, but it seems this exec is open to the concept. In either case, that’s a potential win for the bitcoin community.

Netflix also made the news this week about the possibility of dropping the five-star rating system that has been a hallmark of the site since its inception as a streaming service.

In an interview with Business Insider, CPO Neil Hunt noted that the review system as is encourages people to rate movies based on “quality” instead of “enjoyment,” which leads to odd paradoxes in data. For example, Adam Sandler’s opus “The Ridiculous 6” is attracting lots and lots of viewers, who all go on to give it a terrible review and then watch it again.

The problem, Hunt says, is that if you rate a movie you enjoy poorly on quality grounds, the algorithm Netflix uses to sort data about what consumers like and dislike — and the data sets those algorithms spit out — ends up being suboptimal.

However, though the five-star system is eliciting doubts about its efficacy, for the time being, it is safe, as Netflix has yet to come up with a better solution that will replace it.