Reed Hastings, who runs the streaming company which has been heralded by many as the greatest challenge to free-to-air and subscription TV, said broadcast television would "probably last until 2030."

He likened the business, which has dominated home entertainment for seven decades, to an ageing horse.

It is "kind of like the horse, you know, the horse was good until we had the car," Mr Hastings said during a promotional tour for Netflix's Latin American operations.

Since pushing into the TV mainstream in the last decade, Netflix and other streaming services in the US such as Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus have been blamed for declines in traditional TV viewing and falling cable subscription rates.

That trend - known as cable-cutting - is a major issue in the US, as free-to-air television is often delivered to homes using the same cable as pay television.

The "streaming" space in Australia is still in its infancy, though there are some established players, such as Ezyflix, Quickflix and the Foxtel-owned Presto.

A Nine Network/Fairfax Media joint venture, Stan, is launching next year, as well as a local storefront for Netflix. Fairfax Media owns this website.

Although streaming services are not free, their price point is significantly lower that traditional "pay" television, typically around US$10 per month for a streaming service, compared with US$60 or more for cable TV.

Jitters in the Australian market ahead of the launch of both Stan and Netflix in 2015 have seen Australia's dominant pay television operator, Foxtel, drop its subscription price.

Mr Hastings' remarks follow comments he made in 2013 in which he forecast the "un-bundling" of TV channels.

So-called "bundling" - the notion that a customer must take all of a cable company's channels rather than the two or three they want - has been a long-standing irritation for some pay TV customers.

Mr Hastings said "internet TV" would ultimately replace "linear TV".

He also said that plans in the US by TV ratings company Nielsen to monitor ratings for streaming services was "not very relevant".

The plan has been criticised in the US because it will only monitor streaming service usage via a household's main TV set, and not on other devices, such as computers, iPads and iPhones, which Netflix argues are a big part of their audience.

Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon do not disclose comprehensive audience data for their programs.