After raising prices and losing thousands of customers last year, Netflix is attempting to make a big comeback with exciting new partnerships!

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has recently been meeting with different cable companies to potentially add the streaming service to cable offerings.  When Netflix first launched a few years ago, cable companies saw Netflix as a threat because they provide instant streaming of old TV shows.  Now, by potentially partnering with Netflix, cable companies could see a high rise in revenue.

Reuters states:

Hastings has strongly hinted at investor conferences in recent weeks about the possibility of Netflix one day being a cable channel rival to premium networks like Time Warner Inc’s HBO.

“It’s not in the short term, but it’s in the natural direction for us in the long term,” said Hastings, speaking at an investor conference last week. “Many (cable service providers) would like to have a competitor to HBO, and they would bid us off of HBO.”

While most industry watchers considered Hastings’ comments as little more than thoughts about the future, people familiar with the talks said he has already met with senior cable executives to discuss how such a partnership might work. At least one cable operator could experiment with offering Netflix by the end of the year, said one of the people.

The report also discusses how quickly potential partnerships would be launched:

Even if a deal is reached in the near-term, actually receiving Netflix through a cable provider could still take months to launch. Hastings would first need to rework his licensing deals with programmers since most existing contracts will not allow Netflix to deliver their shows on a cable box, according to a senior programming executive.

Offering Netflix through a cable package could help the streaming service avoid a separate potential clash with cable operators over rising costs for online video traffic over their Internet pipes. Cable operators are the dominant high speed Internet providers in the U.S. and have been trying to devise methods to manage their costs and traffic of online video.

This is quite a jump since Netflix briefly raised prices and created Qwikster last year! What do you think of cable partnerships? Would you buy a cable package that has Netflix?