Will Netflix Be Taking Bitcoin Payments Soon?

January 14, 2016 By: Steven Anderson

It’s an odd question to ask, but progressively, more and more vendors have been allowing the use of Bitcoin in their storefronts.

It’s almost becoming a currency in its own right, and that’s shaking up large portions of the online world. At the 2016 Internet, Media and Telecommunications Conference, Netflix’s chief financial officer David Wells had some unexpected things to say about Bitcoin, and many of these were complimentary in nature.

Wells was asked if Netflix would be open to taking Bitcoin in payment, since it was moving to Latin America, where it was having some troubles accepting certain breeds of payment.

Naturally, if it was finding it necessary to revamp certain systems anyway, it might well be necessary to include Bitcoin in those upgrades. Wells noted that it “…sure would be nice to have Bitcoin, in terms of a global currency, that you could use globally.”

That’s not the same thing as saying Netflix will take Bitcoin for payment any time soon, but it’s certainly also not the same as refusing to take it ever, outright.

Bitcoin might not be a bad idea for Netflix, particularly considering that Netflix is a wholly online operation—DVD shipments aside; after all, a user’s queue is online—but Bitcoin is still a little on the illiquid side, and may not be the kind of thing that every company wants to get into. Granted, Overstock.com seems to be doing all right with it, but that’s Overstock.com.

The fact that Netflix wasn’t willing to just dismiss Bitcoin out of hand is a clear win for Bitcoin in general. Not much of a win, granted, but a win nonetheless; if the digital currency had no credibility, then Netflix’s own CFO would have dismissed it out of hand. Obviously it must have at least some credibility, and that’s good news for the currency overall.

We may not see Bitcoin in Netflix’s payment options menu any time soon, but it can’t be dismissed out of hand thanks to Wells’ remarks. That’s a step forward for Bitcoin, and one of many it may well make in the coming days.