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"Kevin Spacey has said that Netflix&amp;#039;s original content experiment is proof that the TV industry has learned from the failures of the music industry. Spacey is the star and exec producer of Netflix&amp;#039;s original series House of Cards, which has become the online streaming service&amp;#039;s most-watched show. The actor claimed that the overwhelming popularity of the show and critical success with the series was proof that Netflix&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;risk&amp;quot; had paid off.  Netflix has been cagey over specific numbers of viewers for House of Cards, but Spacey said that the media&amp;#039;s fascination with traditional ratings methods was out-of-date. &amp;quot;You have to recognise that the days of looking at ratings in the traditional model with Nielsen are long behind us. Netflix is available in 40 countries around the world,&amp;quot; said Spacey.  &amp;quot;They have now surpassed HBO in terms of subscriptions in the US thanks to House of Cards. &amp;quot;So I think there&amp;#039;s no doubt however you want to measure it, it&amp;#039;s been a success around the world. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s my understanding that it&amp;#039;s been the most-watched programme in the history of Netflix. The thing I&amp;#039;m most delighted about is that it&amp;#039;s been part of a conversation. I&amp;#039;ve been stopped by people of all ages - teenagers and people over 60 and everything in between - who all want to talk to me about it. For me that&amp;#039;s a pretty good measure of success.&amp;quot;  Spacey said that Netflix&amp;#039;s distribution model, which allows fans to watch a whole season of episodes immediately, was something that has &amp;quot;been in the making for a number of years&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;I always thought that eventually we were going to see one of these companies, who was making a tremendous amount of money as a portal for content, wanting to eventually become part of creating the content and become part of the story-telling process,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;We have learned the lessons that the music industry didn&amp;#039;t learn. Give the people what they want, when they want it, in the form that they want it in, at a reasonable price and they&amp;#039;ll buy it and won&amp;#039;t steal it. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the way people are consuming content now. People are spending weekends at home watching two seasons of Dexter or Breaking Bad. Or any of these really finely tuned shows. It&amp;#039;s great to give that freedom to an audience and clearly they want it.&amp;quot;  He also suggested that Netflix&amp;#039;s investment in two seasons of content without seeing a pilot would be a good new method for the traditional TV networks to follow. &amp;quot;Last year, 146 pilots were made, and 35 went to series, and 14 got picked up for more episodes. And this for the cost of 300 to 400 million dollars,&amp;quot; said Spacey.  &amp;quot;Now, I don&amp;#039;t think the pilot is going anywhere soon. However, what I do think is a positive for the industry is this idea of having faith in something. If you believe in the creatives who are involved, maybe it is a better gamble to just to go to series.  &amp;quot;We recognise that it was very unusual and very risky of Netflix to give us 26 chapters to our story. I don&amp;#039;t think that has been done in the history of television.&amp;quot; He added: &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s great not being put in a position where you have to do a pilot. You could view the pilot as an audition and if we were doing a pilot our writers would have to have done an hour or a two-hour episode that established all the characters with arbitrary and artificial cliffhangers.&amp;quot; The Netflix original series House of Cards is available for members to watch instantly on Netflix. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/news/a498573/kevin-spacey-netflix-learned-lessons-of-music-industry/>