Sarandos pointed to Bill Burr as one example of a stand-up comedian who has seen huge success on Netflix, to the point where he can now tour in countries where Netflix is operating its streaming service. Producing stand-up comedy is “also a great way to cultivate talent for future scripted projects,” Sarandos added.

Asked about his plans for the next phase of original shows on Netflix, Sarandos said that he wants to target audiences that the company has so far overlooked, including tweens, Sci-fi fans and sitcom viewers. Altogether, Netflix could debut as many as 16 originals in 2013, according to Sarandos.

In 2013, Netflix is going to launch a total of 8 originals, including the much-anticipated return of Arrested Development, which will premier on Netflix this coming Sunday.

“With the frequent, often last minute, changes in content flow the title expiration data available through our API has been inaccurate, so we have decided to no longer publish this information,” a Netflix spokesperson said via email. The company’s Director of Engineering – API Daniel Jacobson reiterated this point in a post on the company’s developer blog, adding that members will still be able to find the expiration date for each movie or TV show episode on the title’s web page.

The move will likely impact a number of third-party services, and comes two months after Netflix essentially closed its public API to all newcomers. Back in March, Netflix said that it was no longer issuing new API keys because the way the company was changing the API had changed: Initially meant to enable third-party apps, Netflix’s API has been playing a key component for the technology behind the company’s streaming service.

Restrictions to public APIs have been a common pattern for companies like Netflix and Twitter in recent months, but it looks like there may have been another reason for Monday’s changes: Netflix took a number of titles off its catalog in early May, leading some publications to write about “the great Netflix Instant vanishing of 2013” or even a “Streamageddon purge.”

Not all of those stories were completely accurate. Some reported a number of 2000 titles disappearing, but Deadline put the number close to 1000. And reports that Warner was pulling titles off of Netflix to power its own streaming service were quickly denied by the studio.

Netflix clearly wasn’t happy about all that streamageddon talk. Now it looks like it pulled the plug on another part of its API to prevent us from freaking out in the future — like at the end of the month, when a number of Viacom shows are set to disappear from the service.

Fox’s cable TV business made up the vast majority of News Corp’s profits for the quarter ending March 31, contributing $993 million of the $1.36 billion in operating income for the period. Total revenues were $9.54 billion, up 14 percent over the previous year.

The overall home video market is up five percent and “we’re up a bit more than that,” Carey said. “The driving force is digital…the overall marketplace continues to grow really well, and digital is becoming a growing part of what we do.” He also said that the DVD business has stabilized, “with Blu-Ray offsetting the decline in the older formats,” and that “really low-priced rentals” through services like Redbox  are “becoming less of a force.”

In response to an analyst’s question about the future of Hulu, Carey said that the service has “great momentum,” and “we’re particularly excited about subscriptions” through Hulu Plus. “There’s an important role for Hulu Classic in the marketplace,” he said, but “we need to develop the dual-revenue side of it.” In a few years, he said, “Hulu will look a bit different than it does today,” partly in response to changes in Netflix’s business: “Netflix talks about evolving their business to somewhat different business models” (he didn’t elaborate on what those are).

When asked to offer general advice to the broadcast networks, Carey said they are still the “viewership leaders,” but acknowledged the networks might need to “be a bit more targeted in the types of series [they] invest in…networks have been more about the volume game, stuck in historical practices…Do you need to break some of those rules? The answer is clearly yes.”

The spot poked fun at both politics and media, and Spacey’s Frank Underwood character didn’t hold back: “It must be so hard to write jokes about a town that already is one,” he said, just minutes after questioning whether NBC is a “real network.” Even Netflix was the butt of a joke, with congressman Steny Hoyer throwing an expletive-laden complaint about the service not working for him.

Of course, the whole clip is also a testament to how much Netflix has changed over the past few months, and how important it has become in Hollywood. Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, who was in the crowd Saturday night as well, recently told me that his phone has been ringing nonstop since the company first announced its plans for House of Cards.

It looks as if one of those calls may have been about Saturday’s dinner: A Netflix spokesperson confirmed Monday that the company worked together with the House of Cards team to produce the spoof, in a way giving back to the town that made its dark and twisted story lines possible. Or, as Spacey says in the clip:

“Well, you know my motto, Ed. You scratch my back, I won’t lacerate yours.”

The paper repeated some key points Hastings has made it the past, but also included a number of noteworthy new insights, including some data points on how Netflix spends its money.

Notably, Hastings said that Netflix is now spending over $2 billion a year on the licensing and creation of content. The company is spending another $350 million a year on improving its service and apps, including improvements to the streaming quality and customer service. And it is spending over $450 million per year on marketing in all of its markets around the world.

Here are some other key highlights of the paper:

On the future of TV

People love TV viewing, but they hate linear TV, including DVRs and cable VOD services, argued Hastings: “The linear TV channel model is ripe for replacement.” Stepping up to replace it are apps from companies like Netflix, HBO and ESPN, which deliver programming to multiple screens.

Technical advances, including 4k streaming and personalized advertising, will speed up the transition from linear TV to app-based on demand programming, and TV Everywhere will make it easier for cable networks to transition into this new world. And eventually, all of this will fundamentally change how TV is delivered, he said:

“Eventually, as linear TV is viewed less, the spectrum it now uses on cable and fiber will be reallocated to expanding data transmission. Satellite TV subscribers will be fewer, and mostly be in places where high-speed Internet (cable or fiber) is not available. The importance of highspeed Internet will increase.”

On Netflix’s focus

Hastings repeated in the paper that Netflix doesn’t want to compete with cable, but just wants to become one more channel — or app — for consumers to choose from. That also means that the company will focus on a few key areas, and for example not venture into ad-supported programming:

“We don’t and can’t compete on breadth with Comcast, Sky, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, or Google. For us to be hugely successful we have to be a focused passion brand. Starbucks, not 7-Eleven. Southwest, not United. HBO, not Dish.”

For Hastings, this isn’t just about doing the things at which Netflix excels. It’s also about offering consumers a clear idea what they can expect from the service, which is key to get them to tune in to what he described as “moments of truth”:

“Those decision moments are, say, on Thursday 7:15 pm or Monday 2:40 am when our member wants to relax, enjoy a shared experience with friends and family, or is just bored. They could play a video game, surf the web, read a magazine, channel surf their MVPD/DVR system, buy a pay-per-view movie, put on a DVD, turn on Hulu or Amazon Prime Instant Video, or they could tap on Netflix. We want our members to choose Netflix in these moments of truth.”

On licensing

Hastings also shared some details about the company’s approach towards licensing, which has been shifting more and more towards exclusives. Data is guiding decisions on what to license, explained Hastings:

“We might pay, for example, $200,000 for a 4 year exclusive subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) license for a given title. At the time of renewal, we evaluate how much the title has been viewed as well as member rating feedback to determine how much we are willing to pay. How many similar titles we have is also a consideration.”

He didn’t mention it by name, but this reliance on data could be one of the reasons why Netflix decided to not renew a big licensing pact with Viacom. The company revealed earlier this week that its partnership with the cable programmer is about to expire in May. Netflix is now in discussions with Viacom to license individual shows instead.

The paper also pointed out that Netflix has fundamentally changed the licensing of TV shows in particular:

“It wasn’t easy for cable and broadcast networks to syndicate serialized storytelling to others, and we’ve pushed the price up considerably.”

On HBO

Hastings has long maintained that HBO is its biggest competitor. The company revealed Monday that it now has more domestic subscribers than the cable channel, and Hastings repeated in the paper that he wants to significantly outgrow HBO:

“We have more content, more viewing, a broader brand proposition, are on-demand, on all devices, and are less expensive, so we estimate that we can be 2 to 3 times larger than current linear-HBO, or 60-90 million domestic members.”

However, Hastings isn’t ready to count HBO out yet — and in fact argued that the competition from Netflix will actually help make HBO better as well:

“While we are passing HBO in domestic members in 2013, it will be several years before we are peers with them in terms of Original programming, Emmy awards, and international members. It wouldn’t be surprising to us if HBO does their best work and achieves their highest growth over the next decade, spurred on by the Netflix competition and the Internet TV opportunity.”

Hastings was asked about password sharing after Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter had estimated in a Bloomberg story from Monday that as many as 10 million people may be watching Netflix without paying, suggesting that the company may start to crack down on the practice.

Hastings said that sharing passwords with extended family members is “not what we would consider appropriate,” but he added that most of the account sharing would happen within the immediate family — something that Netflix wants to make easier with the introduction of both personalized profiles as well as a more expensive family plan.

Personalized profiles that will allow family members to maintain separate queues and get more personal recommendations will launch internationally within the coming months, the company announced Monday. Netflix has been testing these personalized profiles since the beginning of the year, and Hastings said Monday that the response has been positive. “The key use case is between kids and parents,” he explained, adding that parents have told the company in the past that their experience is suboptimal.

The company also announced Monday that it will launch a new $12 a month family plan that will allow users to stream up to four devices at a time, as opposed to the current two-device streaming limit. However, the company doesn’t expect a huge response to this offering, with Hastings saying Monday that he expect fewer than one percent of subscribers to jump on the offering.

Revenue rose to $1.02 billion in Q1, compared to $889 million in Q1 of 2012. The company added 2.03 million domestic subscribers and now has 29.17 million subscribers in the U.S., compared to 23.41 million in Q1 2012. Internationally, Netflix added 1 million subscribers, which brings the total number of subscribers outside the U.S. to 7 million, compared to 3 million a year ago.

Net income on the other hand is down a bit, coming in at $3 million, or $0.05 earnings per share. Income was dragged down by costs related to debt refinancing, and the company said that it would have had $19 million in net income, or $0.31 per share, without those costs. In Q1 of 2012, Netflix incurred a net loss of $2 million.

The company attributed the results in part to House of Cards, stating that the launch of the show and related marketing activities “provided a halo effect on our entire service.” Of course, we don’t know how many of the new subscribers signed up specifically for House of Cards, or even how many watched the show: Netflix made a conscious decision not to release any ratings for any of its content.

Other than the financials, there were two interesting announcements made in the letter to shareholders: Netflix will introduce a family streaming plan that will allow users to stream to four devices at a time in the U.S. soon. The plan will cost $12 a month, compared to Netflix’s regular $8 plan, which only allows two simultaneous streams.

However, the company doesn’t think this will add a lot to its bottom line: “We expect fewer than 1% of members to take it.” One should note that this is the first time the company has experimented with pricing since it split streaming and DVD plans back in 2011.

Netflix has recently been experimenting with pesonalized profiles to make it easier for family members to find recommendations, and the Q1 letter to investors states that this will be introduced globally in the coming months.

Netflix will hold a conference call at 3pm PT to discuss its results.

This week, news broke that the remaining eight episodes of the ABC sitcom Don’t Trust the B In Apartment 23, which was taken off the air in January, would be posted to ABC.com, Hulu and iTunes.

The announcement is a boon for fans of the show, but they shouldn’t get their hopes up that successful online distribution will mean another season of the show; much of the cast has already moved on to other projects.

However, another show may truly get a second life: Also this week, rumors spread that Microsoft is looking at rebooting NBC’s Heroes, which was canceled in 2010, for Xbox and MSN distribution.

As television continues its evolution from a single box that sits in your living room to a multi-platform experience across many devices, resurrections like these are increasingly common — though sometimes they’re less like Lazarus, and more like zombies.

Netflix is of course a front runner in the rebirth business, thanks to picking up Arrested Development (only one more month, Bluth fans!).

But there’s a deep history to this practice. For instance: In late 2009, producer Ashton Kutcher turned to YouTube to screen the unaired five episodes of model drama The Beautiful Life, which had just been canceled by The CW.

However, while the TBL channel is currently at over five million views, not one of the five episodes on it has surpassed a million views.

They’re all still online, along with a plea posted by Kutcher saying that they’d be able to produce more episodes if the channel’s subscriber count hit a certain, unspecified threshold.

Whatever that threshold was, it was greater than 35,000 subscribers — which is the channel’s current standing, four years later. But TBL does deserve credit for being an early example of a show realizing the potential power of digital distribution — arguably ahead of its time in that respect.

The key is transitioning from digital distribution to actually producing new episodes. The most daring and ultimately successful example of this isn’t necessarily Joss Whedon getting to make a feature film follow-up to Firefly or the return of Veronica Mars as a feature — the real kickoff of digital distribution having real meaning for canceled shows comes from the early 2000s, and DVDs.

The Fox animated series Family Guy first premiered in 1999, and was canceled in 2002. But thanks to blockbuster DVD sales of the first three seasons, it was brought back to the airwaves in 2005, and has remained a key part of Fox’s schedule ever since. Creator Seth MacFarlane has even gone on to create at least two other shows for the network.

(Personal anecdote: I was working as a clerk in a DVD store in 2003, and I keenly remember how we couldn’t keep Family Guy box sets on the shelves; they sold out like crazy.)

Sometimes, things need to end. Sometimes, shows don’t work or don’t connect with a wide audience, and those involved are ready to move on. The Onion satirized this beautifully in the aftermath of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign with this piece headined “Stars Of Canceled Show Terrified Fans Will Raise Money For Movie,” centered around recently-terminated NBC sitcom Animal Practice.

The episodes of Animal Practice left unaired after its cancelation are currently available online, though it’s unlikely to come back — a zombie, for better or worse.

But as the industry figures out how to make original content on the web sustainable and profitable, we’ll see more and more examples of Lazarus.

“House of Cards fav quote: ‘look at the bigger picture.’ Over the last three months, you all watched over 4 billion hours on Netflix. Next up, some real monsters from Eli Roth…”

Hastings has in the past occasionally taken to Facebook  to reveal milestones like these. Most recently, he touted more than one billion hours streamed per month last July. However, that post got him in trouble with the S.E.C., with regulators investigating whether the CEO of a public company can release data like this on Facebook. In the end, the S.E.C. gave in, clearing the path for Hastings to drop further milestones on the social network.

“We are looking for highly motivated individuals with the right mix of technical, organizational and communication skills to provide localization for the Netflix experience in the following languages: Turkish, Dutch, Hindi, French, and Korean.”

The company is also looking for an engineer to be the internationalization and localization evangelist at the company, further highlighting how important international markets are for Netflix.

Netflix has occasionally looked to hire employees to help with its internationalization efforts in the past, and job postings frequently contain countries that the company may not consider at all, just to make things less transparent for competitors. For example, in late 2011, a job offer listed “Turkish, Dutch, Russian, French, Hindi, German, Italian, Danish, Korean, Finnish, Japanese, and Spanish” as languages of interest.

Needless to say, Netflix hasn’t launched in Russia just yet. However, nine months after that job posting, the company announced plans to open shop in Northern Europe – including Finland and Denmark.

It’s very likely that South Korea, India and European countries such as the Netherlands, France and Belgium are at least under consideration as potential targets for further international expansion. Turkey seems less likely, but it’s certainly possible – the country has a thriving TV and movie industry, and it has seen an economic boom even as other parts of Europe have struggled.

Netflix is currently operating in over 40 countries, including the U.K. and Ireland, the Nordics, Latin America and Canada. It might take some time until we find out where Netflix will go next: executives said earlier this year that the company won’t embark on any further international expansions until late 2013 or early 2014. However, CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells also made it clear that they definitely want to expand further, writing in their letter to shareholders:

“Our launch in the Nordics was very successful, confirming our belief in the large international opportunity for our service.”

Map courtesy of Flickr user kcp4911.