[bobjane]

"...they risk turning into a dumb pipe".

That's their problem, they don't own the pipes either. They don't own the pipes and they don't own the content (before House of Cards). Up to now they provided...well...a useful cute little UI, but it's hard to make a lot of profit for a prolonged period of time on that. So they either go into pipe building or content building. Content building has the better leverage to the large customer base they've got, and in that context producing House of Cards makes perfect sense. I hopes it works out for them.

[sp332]

Their infrastructure is valuable, especially the code they have which determines what quality of video they can send you without stuttering or buffering which was better than anything else at the time. That was what got them my money.

[GFischer]

The service Netflix provides is licensing and aggregation, plus the UI and convenience. I'd say the first two are the ones most closely worth U$ 7.99 to me.

IMO, licensing and aggregation are the "hard" problems, not UI or streaming or whatever.