Netflix began in 1997, when Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph had the idea for a mail order rental and purchase service for movies, and experimentally mailed themselves a DVD to see if it could pass through the hands of the United States Postal service unharmed. The DVD arrived intact, and they began working on pulling their idea together.
It took a year, but in 1998 the Netflix website launched, and people are able to log onto the site to request DVDs by mail. AT this point members are still paying on a movie by movie basis, until the subscription option is introduced in 1999. Now members can pay a monthly fee and have access to an unlimited number of DVD requests.
The next feature added to the website is the recommendation system, an algorithm that takes users past requests and their ratings of those requests and uses the data to compile suggestions for the future, a version of which is still used by the company today to make the product as personal as possible for each individual customer. From there Netflix takes off, and two years later it goes public for the first time on May 23, 2002 at $1 a share, much lower than today’s rate, hovering around $490 a share.
It’s at this point that the fast growing company passes the 1 million member milestone, and in 2003 they received a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark office, officially claiming ownership of the rental by mail model. This trend of innovation continues for the next few years, and 2005 marks the first appearance of “Profiles” on the Netflix website, a feature that let subscribers create playlists specifically tailored to family members, moods and tastes. This feature was very successful, and was very likely a contributing factor to the company’s achievement of growing to 5 million subscribers in 2006.
In 2007 Netflix became the first service to offer streaming, so that members didn’t have to wait for their movies to arrive and could instead watch them right away directly on their computer. Streaming, of course, opened entirely new doors to the company, and in 2008 they made deals with the producers of console products like the Xbox and Wii, putting streaming directly on the device rather than needing to be run to it from a laptop. In 2009, as streaming services became available on WiFi enabled smart TVs, membership passed 10 million.
In 2010 Netflix was made available in Canada and revolutionized the market once again by putting streaming on mobile devices. By 2012 their subscriber count has more than doubled, and 25 million people have instant access to all of Netflix’s many programs. 2013 marks another experiment for the company: producing their own original content. Their gamble pays off when ‘House of Cards’ wins three Emmy awards, the first ever to go to a streaming service’s studio. In 2014, membership passed 50 million, spreading to more than 130 countries only two years later.
Now Netflix has over 100 million subscribers worldwide, several dozen awards under their belt, and no plans to slow down as they continue to turn out well loved classics like ‘The Office’ as well as original content at a staggering rate.
Sources: https://about.netflix.com/en
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