Matthew Ball, a strategist for Otter Media, who writes often about the future of television, thinks the latter is more likely. He says that today, when you have a cable subscription, you have access to hundreds of channels — in effect, they all share you as a customer. The cable bundle puts you in a television ecosystem, and you flip from one show to the other depending on what you want to watch. In the emerging on-demand world, television won’t work that way: All the networks will have their own streaming service and customers will have to pay a fee for every one. The days when networks could make money from people who never watch their shows will end.

One consequence is that networks will have to have one-on-one relationships with their viewers — something they have little experience with, and which Netflix, with its ability to “personalize” its interactions with its 81 million customers, has mastered. Another consequence is that as streaming becomes the primary way people watch television, they are highly unlikely to pay for more than a small handful of subscription-TV networks. What they will want, Ball believes, is a different setup: companies that offer far more programming than any one network can provide. Netflix, clearly, has already created that kind of ecosystem. “Netflix is ABC, it is Discovery, it is AMC, it is USA and all the other networks,” Ball said. “Its subscribers don’t say, ‘I love Netflix for Westerns, but I’ll go somewhere else for sci-fi.’ The old model just doesn’t work in an on-demand world.”

In this vision of the future, Netflix’s most potent competitor is likely to be Amazon, which is also developing an extensive array of content, including many of its own original shows. Early on, it, too, produced a highly praised series, “Transparent.” It, too, has no allegiance to the cable bundle. And it has the kind of revenue — exceeding $100 billion — that neither the networks nor Netflix can approach. Compared to the networks, Netflix may have an imposing war chest, but in a fight with Amazon, it would be outgunned.

According to Ball, what Netflix is counting on to maintain its primacy and to start making big profits is “unprecedented scale.” That’s where the effort to create a global network, the one that was announced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, comes in. In April, when the company announced its first-quarter results, it said it had added 4.5 million international subscribers. Yet success, and profits, are still some way off, as Hastings is the first to acknowledge.

YouTube, he notes, is available in more than 50 languages; Netflix can be seen in only 20 languages. Netflix was primarily attracting people in its new countries who speak English as it races to “localize” its service in each country. Netflix is ordering shows with an international flavor, like “Narcos,” but so far it has only a handful up and running. Netflix wants to make “the best Bollywood movie that’s ever been produced,” Hastings told an Indian publication; it wants to make Japanese anime; it wants to make local films for every market; it wants global rights when it licenses shows — something that, once again, contravenes Hollywood’s conventional business model, in which rights are sold on a country-by-country basis. The company still has much to learn about each country’s quirks and tastes and customs, and it will be a while before it can hope to earn a profit from its global customers.

To my surprise, Hastings spoke to me about the current moment as a “period of stability.” It took me a while to understand what he meant, given how unstable the television industry seems to be right now. But Netflix has spent much of its existence zigging and zagging, responding to the pressures of the marketplace.

“When we were in the DVD business,” Hastings said, “it was hard to see how we would get to streaming.” Then it was hard to see how to go from a domestic company to a global one. And how to go from a company that licensed shows to one that had its own original shows. Now it knew exactly where it was going. “Our challenges are execution challenges,” he told me.