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I'm not a pundit and don't feel comfortable about trying to see too far into the future, but I can report on a few trends that are already occurring.

From their recent conference call to analysts after reporting their Fourth Quarter Earnings, Hastings and new CFO, David Wells, gave some insight on upcoming plans. (You can find it here.)

"Our long-term goal is to evolve the Netflix service so that it feels more natural to have a personal account," Hastings stated. "We will also be working on broader Facebook integration which we hope will further the notion of personal accounts. We'll be rolling that out in phases over this year, sort of quarter by quarter and month by month it will get better and better and better."

Netflix's success has made it a target for all of its competitors and new ones keep popping up to carve out a share of what should be an ever expanding piece of the streaming business. For example, Amazon just announced that it has added streaming access to 5,000 movies and TV shows to the package of benefits its "Prime" members get, for no extra charge as part of their $79/year subscription.

It might seem like a strange bedfellow situation since Netflix is a huge customer of AWS (Amazon Web Services) who supplies their data centers, but Hastings doesn't see a conflict.

As far as the new Amazon streaming service, he said, "The Internet is creating a ton of opportunity for a lot of firms and there's all different models between the pay-per-view model for new releases, the ad supported model. So, there's a lot of different companies with different strengths."

In 2010, Netflix expanded its streaming service beyond the U.S. borders into Canada. According to the executives, the operation is advancing ahead of schedule and they hope to turn a profit there within two years.

When asked if they had their sights set on further expansion, they said yes, in 2012 and 2013, but they did not indicate which countries.

As an indication of its foothold in the U.S., more than 200 devices now are capable of streaming from Netflix. And in the next few months, some manufacturers are adding a Netflix-branded one-click button on their remote controls.

Finally, when asked about running into the limits of total bandwidth availability in a given geography, Hastings replied, "We recently did a calculation about fiber optics and what we discovered is that a single fiber optic, about the size of a human hair, because of the advances in dense wave-division multiplexing, can now carry all 100% of the Netflix traffic. And, furthermore...I would say the rate of innovation in data transmission, especially on fiber, is greatly outstripping any growth that we could possibly get to."

Netflix has established itself as one of the preeminent movie rental companies in the U.S., but that doesn't mean that there is not room for improvement, especially with their streaming service.

I understand that not everyone has a fast enough network connection to take advantage of higher resolution streams, but I definitely would like to see Netflix move to streaming movies and TV shows in 1080p resolution with 5.1 surround sound.

And of course, I would love them to expand the number of titles that are available for streaming. Until that time, I will keep subscribing to a DVD + streaming plan, which is still a whale of a bargain for film fans.