Netflix Streaming Video
Liberty University
Netflix Background Information
History
Netflix was founded in 1997, and within a few years, began changing the way the world would watch movies. The idea for Netflix came to founder, Reed Hastings after he was forced to pay high late fees for a movie he had forgotten to return to the local video store (How Netflix got started, n.d.). Predicting the impact Netflix would have on television, and video rentals would have been nearly impossible at that time. Amazon.com is talking with book publishers about launching a Netflix like service for digital books, in which customers would pay an annual fee to access a library of content, according to people familiar with the matter (Woo, & Trachtenberg, 2011), this has Netflix considering the same move. Today, the company stays proactive and continues to incorporate new techniques and technology, while continuing to rule the market of streaming videos.
Netflix originally started out offering movies for rental via direct mail with an inventory of only 920 different movie choices. They introduced the monthly subscriptions in September 1999, effectively removing all late fees for movies rented. Mochari (2014) explains that in 2000, Blockbuster turned down an offer to purchase forty-nine-percent stake in Netflix and take the name Blockbuster.com. The price of the offer is not reported. In an interesting twist of fate, Blockbuster famously announced it was going out of business. Netflix, one month before Blockbuster's white flag, announced it had 31 million U.S. subscribers (Mochari, 2014). By 2005, the company had grown to nearly 35,000 different film titles available, and they were shipping around 1 million DVDs out every day.
Netflix continued to push their way forward, in 2007, when they began streaming movies. This new service followed a similar path as the DVD service, by starting with a small inventory and with relatively slow reaction times....