Hastings had a conversation with The Motley Fool recently in which he says that he believes that DVD only has a few years left at the top of the food chain.  Though he previously estimated a much longer life for DVD, he says that while DVDs will certainly exist in some form or another for the next decade or so they’ll stop being the primary delivery format as soon as 2011.  As he puts it, “For Netflix, I would guess another couple years it [DVD] will be the primary, and it will be part of our offering for 10, 20 years.”  
 
Interestingly, the one thing that he didn’t say is what he believes the next successor will be.  It could very easily be that Hastings is putting Netflix’s eggs into the digital delivery basket.  He says that innovation is the key to staying in the public mind.  “If you look at companies that were really big, like Palm that was really hot 10 years ago or AOL that was hot 15 years ago, it’s really easy to go from a hot company to a not hot company,” he muses.  “You’ve always got to stay on the edge and constantly improving.”