To paraphrase the line from the desi picture Don (1978, 2006), if he wasn't dealing in something altogether legit/legal, 190 mulkon ki (countries') police would anxiously wait to nab Ted Sarandos, 54, by now. For, he's singularly responsible for perhaps the hugest urban, global addiction/affliction of our times. I tell him that as we meet, and he laughs. "Subconsciously influenced" by the daily show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman back in the '70s — the entire weeks' episodes of which he used to watch with his parents on Sunday nights, when they were aired back-to-back on TV — Sarandos essentially came up with a simple but evidently life-altering idea of dropping the full season of a TV show, to be consumed at one go on Netflix, while a countdown almost seduces you to press for the next episode, when the previous one has just finished.

While working on what was then a rental library, Sarandos could also see vast number of customers, who would order in to "watch a few episodes a night [of a TV show], and burn through the [entire] box set!" This didn't surprise him at all. At a practical level however, Sarandos insists, "When we started with House Of Cards, our clear intent was to let the market know that we're not making webisodes, or YouTube videos. We're pushing television to the edges. A crude way of putting that across, would include 60-minute episodes, without commercials — which makes it 15 to 20 minutes longer than an hour on TV. And you don't need recaps of what you saw last week [when the entire season is right there]."