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Quickflix: “We’ve got to get ourselves to profitability”

Quickflix: “We’ve got to get ourselves to profitability”

Quickflix has grand plans for 2013.

The Netflix threat

At CeBit in October last year, Parsons said the company was trying to keep US competitor Netflix out of the country by signing agreements with as many companies as it could for exclusive rights to devices.

Quickflix has now signed agreements for exclusive streaming rights on more than 200 devices.

“We’re always concerned and we’ve taken on a particular strategy to roll out to as many devices and [to] as many platforms as we could as fast as we could to try [to] get a first mover advantage,” Parsons says.

“As a business we’re both trying to be super progressive and leading edge and we have one eye over our shoulder [for] players that have more money and larger content stores than we do internationally. It’s something that we’re constantly thinking about.”

While Netflix has been battling it out in the US courts over an alleged “unfair advantage” it received from the US Postal Service, Quickflix is currently in discussions with Australia Post to enable postal delivery of its DVDs up to one day sooner.

Quickflix already has a partnership with the postal service, but Parsons says opportunities have been identified which would enable DVDs to be delivered sooner.

“There’s a huge amount of technology that can go into speeding up how DVDs in Sydney, for example, [that] might land in a post box in Perth or Adelaide and how you can do that even faster than regular mail. That’s where a partnership with Australia Post is critical,” he says.

The NBN to drive future growth

While the National Broadband Network (NBN) is not yet bringing any benefits to Quickflix’s business, Parsons is hoping it will have a significant impact in the future and it will encourage people who were on patchy broadband to sign up to its service.

Quickflix is hoping its business will grow by as much as 10-15 per cent due to the NBN.

“So definitely we’re great supporters of the NBN. We hope it has an impact on us ... we’ve got our fingers crossed,” Parsons says.

However, he concedes the NBN could increase competition in the online streaming environment.

“I think yes, we’ll have more competitors but at the same time the pie will be bigger and anything that educates people and makes it easier for them to take the service [up] quite quickly, we’ll be there and we’ll be there saying ‘bring it on’,” Parsons says.

“We want a piece of that large pie as it grows.”

Follow Stephanie McDonald on Twitter: @stephmcdonald0

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