Kevin Spacey, 'TV Smarter Than Music Industry': 'House of Cards' Star's 2013 Emmy Nomination Reaction & Netflix Success
The Netflix exclusive series "House of Cards" has received 9 nominations for this year's 65th annual Primetime Emmy Awards Ceremony and the show's star and executive producer, Kevin Spacey, shared his feelings on his show's success. Talking to The Wrap this morning after Neil Patrick Harris and Aaron Paul announced the nominations, Spacey says that the Television Academy made a smart move for the future when they decided to adopt "a new way of viewing" nominees. He said that the television industry is succeeding where others have failed.
"For the Academy to recognize us, being the new kids on the block, is fantastic," Spacey said from the set of "House of Cards," which is about halfway through shooting its second season. "I think that because of this, more companies that have been primarily or specifically in the portal business will want to get into the original content business. Because if you're going to compete, that's what you'll have to do."
"The way in which it has been distributed is really in line with the way in which audiences have been discovering their entertainment over the last number of years," he said, referring to his show's exclusivity with Netflix. "You ask anybody what they did over the weekend, and they say, 'I stayed home and watched two seasons of 'Breaking Bad.' That's the way audiences have been consuming shows that are very complicated, with multiple storylines. We're now the first original series to be released that way, but it has been going on for quite some time -- although it doesn't affect the way we create the series, because the camera doesn't know it's a streaming camera any more than it would know it was a TV camera or a film camera."
The 53-year-old actor explained that these Emmy nominations just prove that Netflix is in touch with the future of the industry.
"We are giving the audience what they want, which is the freedom to discover it the way they want to discover it," he explained. "And I think it also in some measure shows that we have learned the lesson that the music industry didn't learn -- that if you give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, then they'll buy it and they won't steal it."
"Why is 'Game of Thrones' the single most pirated show in the history of television? Because people can't get it fast enough," Spacey added.
Do you agree with the actor's notions of Netflix and the future of television?