Does HBO Fear the Rise of Netflix Originals?

APThis image released by Netflix shows Kevin Spacey in a scene from the Netflix original series “House of Cards”�

Netflix turned plenty of heads over the weekend with the debut of House of Cards, a political drama series bankrolled by the company at a cost of $100 million. Exclusive to the streaming service and put online all at once — a 13-episode dump of the entire first season — the unconventional release of the show got plenty of attention.

For Netflix, which earns all its revenue from $8/month subcription fees, the more big hit shows you can only find on its service means more subscribers — the only way the company can grow. In that sense, it’s in a similar position to premium cable TV channels like HBO, which need to convince cable customers to take an extra hit on their monthly bill just to have access to the shows they can’t get anywhere else.

So what do HBO’s corporate owners at Time Warner think about House of Cards, and the entry of Netflix into the original, high-quality programming business? � Here’s Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes on an earnings call today, responding to a question on what the Netflix move means for HBO:

I feel great about how HBO is doing today. I think we just talked about it. It’s got the best original programming slate ever, a lot of very high-profile series and more every year. We’ve locked up the theatrical movie position for the next decade. The HBO GO product is a fantastic, 21st-century, Internet-ready product, and we just added more subs than at any time in the last 10 years.

Now let’s go over and give a little credit to Netflix. They’re doing a great job. I think the functionality of their service, some of the really consumer-friendly effectiveness of their search, if you’re watching it, finding what you want to watch, getting recommendations to go through a very, very deep library, a lot of programming, it’s — the more programs you have on a service, the more important it is to be able to find them.

But if you talk about original programming, HBO has always operated in a competitive environment. We’ve been happy to see some of the successes at Showtime and Stars recently in originals. Netflix has a new original that’s pretty good, House of Cards. I think that’s great. It’ll take a while for that to turn into — I forget, what does HBO get? 10 or so hits here? It’s all good.

I think it reminds consumers of the choice that they have of television programming on demand. And it’s an extremely — the cycle of making breakthrough original programming and having people find it and use it, which HBO has been doing for 20 years, and Netflix is now joining, it takes a while to get that up to scale.

It seems, for now, that Time Warner is fairly content with an upstart competitor. Bewkes also noted that expanding the market of people willing to pay good money for TV shows online is good news for businesses like his that benefit from better quality shows being made in the first place: “this emerging back end for cable originals is a very promising sign,” he said, “since it should result in production values for cable originals getting even better over time.”