Ted Sarandos, the chief of content and programming at Netflix, says the company isn’t trying to outdo TV, it’s trying to do something completely different.

When Netflix released the first season of House of Cards to the world, every episode at once, it was treated as a milestone in a revolution. It was a front-page story in The New York Times — “New Way to Deliver a Drama: All 13 Episodes in One Sitting.”

But inside Netflix, said its chief content officer Ted Sarandos, it was merely “a super-practical decision.” The company had been paying attention to its users’ viewing behavior, Sarandos said. Some people watched four episodes of a show. Some people watched seven. “Nobody watched one.”

Sarandos was speaking in a session at the 2015 Aspen Ideas Festival, billed in the program schedule as “The New Golden Age of Television.” But from the way he talks about what Netflix is doing, he doesn’t think of the company as making “television” at all, but something quite different.

That all-at-once drop of House of Cards, for example, illustrates part of what Netflix has that television doesn’t. “It was not meant to be the template” for how Netflix would release shows, Sarandos said. “It was just, Let’s see how people watch it.” They had the flexibility to try something that would never work on TV, and the data to see immediately how users responded.

Read the article “Netflix, Ted Sarandos and What Comes After TV” on theatlantic.com.