Netflix was made on August 27th, 1997 when two friends Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph wondered if a DVD would survive a trip through the mail, so they made a simple dare for themselves to find an answer to their question. They mailed themselves a DVD, found it returned to them unharmed which gave them a brilliant business idea. This is how Netflix began as nothing more than a simple website for people to rent DVDs through the mail but from there it blossomed into so much more.
However, this process was one of small steps and continuous hard work which continued to prove rapid success. Their decisions to create features like a review system for customers after they rented a movie and the ability for customers to make lists of their favorite movies were invaluable to Netflix’s quick success, as shown by their over one million subscribers after just six years of operation. This pool of people then expanded to five million in only three years after that. These days, Netflix is the name brand for at home movie streaming but streaming was not even a feature of Netflix until 2007. This was immensely successful for them as the only other names in the game back then were Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, both of which launched around the same time. Five years later, Netflix had quintupled their subscriber count again to twenty five million. If you thought that was impressive, currently Netflix sits as the top over all other streaming services in terms of subscribers with a whopping 238.39 million subscribers. This is more than Disney +, Hulu, and ESPN+ put together, which Disney did do with the Disney+ bundle.
However, has the rise of Netflix left a positive impact on the world? First off, you have to acknowledge that the success of Netflix has brought about the rise of most of the streaming service and free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) industry. With the rise of this industry has inevitably come the death and decline of several other industries. Most notably is video rental service stores such as Blockbuster, which have now famously become a relic of the late nineties and early two thousands (with the exception of the last bastion in Bend, Oregon). Next has come the slow decline of movie theaters. Even Dartmouth has begun to look into this trend and they have found via an online survey in 2022 that 41% of respondents rarely go to see a movie at the theater. The main two reasons they cited as to why streaming services have just now begun to win out the battle against movie theaters is the massively increased usage of streaming services during the Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that a monthly Netflix subscription is now cheaper than a single movie ticket. Although it would be sad to see movie theaters disappear, some could argue that in the United States’ capitalistic system, it is our very competitive nature that stronger businesses with better products will cull out the weak ones. Therefore, it is up for you to decide: Is Netflix a better product for distributing movies and TV shows and therefore deserves to be on top or has it become the Walmart of the entertainment industry, eating up little ma and pop movie theaters that cannot compete with their better prices from mass media dispersal? Personally, Netflix has won me over with some of their many Netflix originals. I know I appreciate them a whole lot for making “Stranger Things” and “The Umbrella Academy,” even their worst creations, like “Tall Girl,” have given people all across the globe something to entertain them for just a couple hours.
If you want to hear about Hastings and Randolph’s success story, you can read from it from this part of the official Netflix website: https://about.netflix.com/en
My other sources are here:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/net-worth
https://www.hollywoodinsider.com/streaming-services-theaters/
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/01/08/netflixs-first-ceo-on-reed-hastings.html
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