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Facebook has just named Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings to its baord.

Hastings co-founded Netflix in 1997 with then CEO Marc Randolph and launched the subscription service in 1999.

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Netflix CEO and founder Reed Hastings took the stage at All Things Digital’s ninth conference, speaking with Kara Swisher about the company’s future strategy, competition, content deals and more. When asked about whether the company is looking to add more new released, Hastings said that Netflix is actually a complement to platforms that offer new releases.

One of the pain points of using Netflix is that the TV and movie platform doesn’t offer a lot of new releases, the way that iTunes or Hulu does. But Hastings doesn’t seem to be too concerned about this, openly stating that he feels that Netflix can be paired with sites and platforms that offer newer content. He added that he’d like to include prior-season shows from channels like HBO and Showtime. He says his ‘check isn’t big enough for now’ but there are ongoing talks about buying this type of content.

In terms of licensing content from studios and content owners, Hastings said that the “relationship thing is over stated,” and if you have a big checkbook you can make the deals.

With regard to the competition, Hastings believes that Comcast’s on-demand platforms like TV Everywhere will become a major competitor as cable and telecommunications companies improve their on subscription and content offerings. In order to compete with both these companies and platforms like iTunes, Amazon and Hulu; Hastings says Netflix will have to improve personalization, the user interface, and work on how to integrate social features.

International expansion is also a significant focus for the company in the coming year. Netflix launched in Canada and will expand to a second, unnamed country later this year. Hastings says Asia is a particularly important region for Netlfix’s expansion, with potential markets in Korea, Indonesia, Japan, and India.

What’s keeps him up at night? Hastings says that he worries about continuing to innovate, as a large company. One of the keys to this is building up quality talent.

Netflix is leading the charge when it comes to streaming movies and TV shows over the Internet. It’s no longer focussed on DVDs, even though it is about to ship its 3 billionth disc. As bandwidth to the home increases, streaming will just continue to become more popular. At the Wired business conference earlier this week, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings predicted that gigabit-per-second speeds to the home will become common over the next decade.

I caught up with Hastings just before he went onstage and shot the video interview above (in which he does a mean impression of a 56K dial-up modem to illustrate how far we’ve come). “Streaming is the core of our business and it is growing rapidly.” he told me. “Streaming is much bigger than DVD for us in terms of hours of viewing, growth, and focus. We are seeing massive consumer adoption of streaming.” Not only that, but DVD growth might have peaked. Off camera, Hastings told me that DVD shipments for Netflix “this quarter may go the down first time ever.”

In this video, he also downplays the importance of Netflix licensing original programming (“it is no big strategy shift”) and explains why all you-can-eat subscriptions work so well for Netflix regardless of how people choose to watch their movies (DVDs, laptops, tablets, phones). He was a little too polite on-camera. But when I asked him what he thought about the New York Times’ multi-tiered paywall strategy in contrast to an all-you-can-eat subscription pricing, he responded: “If you are on the iPad and it has Safari and you go to the NyTimes.com and it works fine. Then you are asked to pay for the iPad app—that does not sound consumer friendly.” Exactly.

Netflix is blowing the doors off its business, with $3 billion in annualized revenue and a $12 billion market cap driven by the transition to streaming online video. In terms of hours watched, streaming surpassed DVDs for Netflix in the fourth quarter, but CEO Reed Hastings has been preparing for this moment for more than decade. The name Netflix itself always held the promise of movies delivered over the Internet. The problem, says Hastings in an interview today at the Wired business conference, was that back then they couldn’t stream movies over 56K modems.

But there was Moore’s Law and improvements in bandwidth which could be plotted, and that is exactly what Hastings did. “We took out our spreadsheets and we figured we’d get 14 megabits/sec to the home by 2012, which turns out is about what we will get.” So what does his spreadsheet tell him about the next ten years? “If you drag it out to 2021, we will all have a gigabit to the home.”

One advantage consumers will see with streaming over cable settop boxes or DVD players is that upgrades to the quality can happen much faster because they are not dependent on switching out boxes in everyone’s home. While streaming is just now catching up with high-definition streams, that progress should keep advancing and even leapfrog hardware solutions that really only change every ten years or so. Streaming Netflix movies to multiple high-def screens is only a matter of time.

As it turned out, however, the DVD business was not just a way to bide time while the network caught up. It laid the economic groundwork for the streaming business to become established because of the need to license content, which it doesn’t have to do with DVD rentals. “If we had tried to launch streaming in the beginning,” says Hastings, “I’m sure it wouldn’t have worked because we couldn’t have written big checks. Now we can write a $50 million or $100 million check which gets the content flowing. As we get more subscribers, we can write bigger checks.”

Asked whether Netflix threatened the cable companies, Hastings was careful to say that he doesn’t want to replace cable. That is why Netflix continus to focus on older movies rather than new releases, sports, or news. “We have consistently said that would not be profitable for us,” he says. “It would start an Armageddon battle, and we would not emerge alive from that battle. So we are concentrating on our niche.” And yet, Netflix is experimenting with licensing better programming and even original series. You can bet those experiments will continue.