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.”

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“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.

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This month, the company is announcing a feature that will allow users to leave structured reviews (with a one star to five star rating), adding structure to the traditional feedback people leave on the Q&A site for products like books, TV shows, cars, or tech hardware.

In the past eight months we’ve seen the company launch embeddable threads, an Android app, designated power user status, an “online now” feature, a blogging platform, and a rich text editor for mobile, to name a few. The company took an significant $50 million in venture funding last May, and is clearly under a good deal of pressure to prove traction and adoption (landing it in hot water last month as a result). So embracing a product-driven approach to growth is understandable.

As with all of the company’s updates, the new review features attempts to highlight the quality the company is known for generating in its question and answer pages. Reviews would certainly make the site more even more SEO-friendly by surfacing reviews for popular shows like House of Cards when someone is Googling for information about the show. So it’s a natural progression for the company, although a review feature certainly isn’t unique to Quora.

“I think the biggest benefit is that it provides structure and categorization to this type of knowledge,” said Quora’s Marc Bodnick, who handles marketing for the company. He emphasized that Quora is not as interested in encouraging reviews of local businesses or restaurants, as sites like Yelp have a strong hold on that type of content. “The big reason why we’re excited to launch his product is to signal to readers and writers that there’s one place to write this type of question. So we’re hoping that if users think to themselves that if they want to write something about House of Cards, there will be a place to do that.”

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That kind of targeting is part of Netflix’s approach to use “a balance of intuition and analytics” for its original content, explained Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos during an interview on the sidelines of the at All Things Digital’s Dive into Media conference in Dana Point, California Tuesday. Netflix is using “really big data,” as Sarandos put it, to evaluate everything from promotion of its original content to the question of which shows it is going to pick up next.

And we are talking not just simply audience size levels, but very fine-grained data, down to the engagement level with each individual piece of content, as well as the mix of content each subscriber is watching. “When you say ten million people watch a show, that really doesn’t tell you anything,” he said.

As a consequence, Netflix isn’t talking about how many people have been watching House of Cards ever since the show went up on the service earlier this month. “We are not doing ratings,” Sarandos said on stage Tuesday afternoon, adding the vague assesment: “We are thrilled with the numbers.” Asked what he would tell if House of Cards star Kevin Spacey called to ask about those numbers, Sarandos replied: “I don’t tell him.”

Creatives, however, don’t seem  upset about such secrecy. Arrested Development creator Mitchell Hurwitz and star Will Arnett, who joined Sarandos on stage, pointed to the problems they had with the industry’s love for ratings when their show was on air. Back then, Nielsen wasn’t including catch-up views from DVRs and online platforms in their ratings, and many of the show’s viewers simply didn’t register. “Appliance stores knew we were huge, but Nielsen didn’t give a sh*t about it,” Hurwitz joked. “The Nielsen system I think is incredibly flawed,” agreed Arnett.

That’s why a ratings-free approach is so appealing to creators, and potentially so disruptive to the industry as a whole. “The model is going to change,” predicted Hurwitz. Creatives would have to work with a different economic model, because a deal like the one with Netflix doesn’t include residuals. “The trade-off is that we are encouraged to make a more interesting show as opposed to flattening it out,” he said. Arnett agreed: “It’s very inviting to people in the creative community to have a place like Netflix,” he said.

Sarandos echoed that sentiment when talking to me, admitting that his phone has been pretty much ringing non-stop ever since the company announced that it got David Fincher to do House of Cards. “We became a first stop as opposed to a last stop,” after that announcement, he said.

This story was corrected on Sunday 2/17 with the correct first name of the creator of Arrested Development. His name is Mitchell Hurwitz, not Michael.

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In addition, Netflix announced it will make new DreamWorks movies available for streaming, “beginning with the studio’s 2013 film line-up.”

“Netflix boasts one of the largest and fastest-growing audiences in kids television. They pioneered a new model for TV dramas with House of Cards, and now together, we’re doing the same thing with kids’ programming,” DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg said in a statement.

Turbo is an animated film about a snail who competes in the Indy 500. Netflix’ series will focus on Turbo’s subsequent adventures. The show’s first season includes 26 episodes, each 22 minutes long. A Netflix spokeswoman wouldn’t say whether the entire season will be released at once, as it was with House of Cards.

Amazon is also pushing into original children’s programming for Prime Instant Video, and recently announced its first five pilots.

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But a week later, the David Fincher-produced political drama has raised a number of questions about the current state of television — and what impact the Netflix model of distribution might have upon it.

Spoiler Alert!

Spoiler etiquette — otherwise known as “When is it okay to openly tweet about what just happened on ?” — is a touchy subject for television fans who worry about being ruined for a show’s best twists. A few months ago, Sam Biddle at Gizmodo proposed the following rules, which work well for serialized fare:

1. A seven day grace period for new episodes.
2. Putting major spoilers on Twitter is a no-no.
3. If it’s off the air, it’s fair game.
4. Even outside of the grace period, a heads up about spoilers in mixed company is polite.

But how does the grace period work when everyone’s watching at their own pace? If, a month from now, I tell someone why the ending of House of Cards‘s “Chapter 7″ is [SPOILER ALERT] very creepy, would they have the right to be upset?

Informally, many I’ve talked to are about halfway through the first season — and even if a friend says to me that they just finished Chapter 5, one of the consequences of binge-viewing is that episodes have a habit of blending together: Only the most attentive of viewers are able to remember exactly which episodes contain which plot developments (though the creepy sex scenes do stand out).

There’s no good answer for this yet, which means for the duration we’re probably going to see a lot of articles like Aymar Jean Christian’s at Televisual, which goes into detail about a character revelation from “Chapter 8,” but only after being heavily couched with spoiler warnings.  It’s not terribly efficient, but ultimately the prudent approach — unless you want to be Miss Know-It-All from Netflix’s own ads.

Binge-Viewing: Bad for television?

The Onion AV Club, that sprawling nexus of television commentary, is approaching House of Cards with a two-pronged approach: Reviewing episodes on a week-by-week basis, while allowing commenters who have already binged a spoiler-soaked forum for discussion.

But the AV Club also ran a piece this week entitled “Could Netflix’s programming strategy kill the golden age of TV?”, in which TV editor Todd VanDerWerff observed that he may have liked House of Cards less if he was watching it on a weekly schedule:

Binge-viewing has advantages over watching episodes one at a time… Individual episodes’ flaws become magnified when viewers have a week between episodes to stew over them, but in the middle of a binge, those flaws are diminished, simply because it’s always time to move onto the next thing…  I wouldn’t give any of the seven House Of Cards episodes I’ve watched higher than a B+, but I also wouldn’t go lower than B-. The show neatly splits the difference between being just good enough and never trying anything risky enough to turn off large portions of its audience.

A counterpoint by critic Jaime Weinman suggests that the new world order pushes us to evaluate shows as complete seasons, rather than on an episode by episode basis, which may ultimately create a stronger viewing experience:

After watching something for 13 hours, it’s difficult to know what the good parts or the bad parts are, or even to follow anything beyond the basic plot; everything blurs together. Yet that in itself is a possible argument for binge-viewing. Watching an episode a week tends to inflate the importance of every episode, sometimes beyond what a single TV episode can sustain. This, I think, is part of the reason that we’re more likely to be disappointed by new episodes of a series when they appear once a week, and why seasons often look better when they go to DVD or to daily syndication. The shorter the wait between episodes, the less of a life-or-death proposition every episode becomes.

But what definitely suffers is be the discussion of television online (which is probably one of the Top 10 internet recreations, right after pornography, fantasy football and cat videos). After all, it’s tough to talk about a show when everyone’s on a different episode — controlling their individual viewing, but at the expense of the communal experience.

House of Cards: Available on DVD and Blu-ray?

Speaking of internet commments — the question I’ve been seeing a lot of places is will the first season of House of Cards be released in disc form anytime in the future?

While yes, the market for physical media may be dying, it’s not dead yet: In 2012, according to the Los Angeles Times, DVD/Blu-ray sales actually increased (by a fraction) to $18 billion. People without Netflix subscriptions, whose binge-viewing is enabled by box sets, still exist — even Netflix still makes 50.1 percent of its profits off the DVD rental side of its business.

According to a Netflix spokesperson, Netflix currently has the first window of exclusivity for the series, but when that window is complete, Media Rights Capital (the production company behind the series) will also be able to pursue a home video release for the show. So, the odds are good that you’ll be able to give your thriller-loving grandparents Season 1 on Blu-ray as early as this summer.

This is just the beginning of Netflix’s 2013 of original content, and at the very least House of Cards is an exciting way to kick it off. Because love it or hate it, one thing is definitely true: It’s got people talking.

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House of Cards, created for Netflix by Beau Willimon and David Fincher, is an adaptation of the British novel and miniseries of the same name, with Kevin Spacey starring as the manipulative Francis Underwood. It has a solid cast, premium cable production quality, and plenty of political intrigue to play out over the first 13 episodes, which went live at midnight Friday.

And as soon as it went live, I started watching. I made it through the first two episodes last night, then fell asleep around 2:30 AM watching Chapter 3, which I then resumed watching around 7:30 AM. Over the following five and a half hours, I was able to get to the beginning of Chapter 9, then took a two-hour break to run some errands and remember what fresh air smelled like.

By 6:30 PM, nearly 18 hours later, I’d consumed the entire first season, all 13 episodes. It was a pretty long day.

Complicated, grim, nasty and engaging

I’ve marathoned television before — in fact, Netflix’s recent acquisition of The West Wing has been a major obstacle in my productivity lately — but usually I know what kind of show I’m in for. So the first part of the experience was discovering that House of Cards was complicated, grim and alternately nasty and engaging. Kevin Spacey goes full-on anti-hero, while Robin Wright, as his chilly wife Claire, proves to be his equal. Spending a day in their world was intense.

The big thing I feel about binge-viewing is that it makes you conscious of what parts of the show really engage you. Chapter 8 was an interesting episode from a number of perspectives: Just past the halfway point in the season, the episode focuses on Spacey paying a visit to his alma mater for a library dedication; most of the action is devoted to Underwood and his old school friends paling around.

It makes for a nice calm before the storm — however, Kate Mara’s reporter character doesn’t show up at all in Chapter 8, which is disappointing because the twisted relationship between her and Spacey, I felt, lead to some of the show’s most fascinating scenes. Chapter 8, in which they don’t interact at all, was disappointing from that respect.

Fortunately, instead of waiting a week for a new episode to address that, I just had to queue up the next episode. Which was convenient. And then, the back half of the season really takes off: Chapters 9, 10, and 11 each end with solid cliffhangers, and the show settles into a nice momentum up to the finale.

Binging doesn’t give you time to mull things over

However, the consequence of that momentum might be a loss of nuance. There are many elements I feel I didn’t comprehend as well as I might have, because of marathoning the show: It makes you conscious of the fact that with conventional dramas like Homeland and Game of Thrones, waiting a week between episodes creates an opportunity to mull over storylines that might get drowned out by bigger events.

For example, there’s a subplot involving Robin Wright’s growing interest in origami that doesn’t really affect the major plot at all, except when serving as punctuation in a couple of key scenes.

The origami thing lead to some intriguing character moments, but the only reason I remembered that it happened, at the end of the day, was because I’d made a note about it. The big events of the show stand out clearly in my head, but if I were to go back later and rewatch at a slower pace, I’m sure I’d discover new details.

Watched all at once, also, meant that things like the heavy product placement for Apple products and Sony video games stood out distinctly.

A game-changer, or just too dark?

Not only did Netflix publicly announce at midnight that the show was live, but throughout the day it encouraged viewers to marathon the show — cheering them on via both the Netflix and House of Cards Twitter accounts.

It's okay if you called in sick today. #HouseOfCards—
House of Cards (@HouseofCards) February 01, 2013

People have called the series a game-changer for Netflix, the subscription service’s equivalent to AMC’s Mad Men or HBO’s The Sopranos. But I’m not convinced that substituting the buzz that those shows acquire over the course of a season for the buzz of binge-viewing will pay off. It’s hard to watch television this way. Especially a show as dark and serious as House of Cards is.

If it wasn’t for the challenge of the assignment, to be honest, I don’t think I’d have gulped down House of Cards in a day. It’s heavy stuff, without much levity, and as mentioned above I think there are elements of it that I would have enjoyed more with a little distance and time.

That said, as the credits rolled on Episode 13, this was my first thought: “When does Season 2 start?”

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Show notes for this episode:

• Netflix is going to release the entire first season of House Of Cards on Februar 1. Check out the show page on Netflix.com for more details.
• You can read our previous House of Cards coverage.
• Check out our e-book Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable to learn more about various devices that House Of Cards and other Netflix content is available on. The book is available for $5 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iTunes.

Are you going to watch House Of Cards? Is original programming like this making Netflix more valuable for you, or would you prefer if the company spent its money on other content instead? Please share your thoughts in the comments, get in touch with us on Twitter (@cordcutters) or email us at cordcutters @ gigaom.com. Also, please check out our new Google+ Cord Cutters community!

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Netflix is set to launch the show, which will star Kevin Spacey, in its entirety to all of its subscribers in any of its 40 markets on that day. The two executives argued in the letter that this model will not only “delight international members,” who are used to long release windows from other TV properties, but eventually also prove to change the face of television. “We believe original series developed for Internet TV will be better for creators, better for consumers, and better for Netflix,” the letter states.

That bold outlook comes at a day when Netflix beat market expectations by ending 2012 in black as well as with more than 33 million worldwide subscribers.

The key metrics:

• Netflix saw $945 million in revenue in Q4 of 2012, compared to $876 million in Q4 of 2011.
• The company booked a net income of $8 million. That may look low when compared to $35 million in Q4 of 2011, but is above its own Q4 guidance, which topped out at $2 million.
• Earnings are $0.13 a share, compared to $0.64 in Q4 of 2011.
• In the U.S., Netflix now has 27.15 million streaming subscribers.
• International subscribers came in at 6.12 million.
• DVD subscriptions continue to decline to 8.22 million, but the rate in decline considerably slowed: In Q4 of 2011, Netflix reported the loss of 2.76 million DVD subscribers. This time around, it only lost 380,000.
• That last number is important because DVD subscribers still make up for a big chunk of Netflix’s profits — the contributing margin was 50.1 percent in Q4, to be precise.

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