Netflix is widely recognised as one of the biggest streaming platforms in the country. The video-on-demand service, which lets you watch thousands of movies movies and TV shows, has become a staple in most homes.
Latest figures show Netflix currently has more than 230 million subscribers worldwide. It is more accessible today than ever, with the app available on a multitude of devices, including TVs, phones and games consoles.
But there was a time when the company was just a modest start up looking to disrupt the video rental industry that it revolutionised and currently dominates.
READ MORE: Netflix ends DVD-by-mail service after 25 years
Earlier this month it was announced that Netflix will be pulling the plug on it’s DVD-by-mail service which launched the company more than 25 years ago.
It was back in California on August 29, 1997, that Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded the company.
Hastings was a computer scientist and mathematician who had recently come into some money after a software he helped develop called ‘Pure Atria’ was sold for $750 million.
Marc Randolph was a marketing director for Pure Atria at the time of the sale and that is how the two met. The pair came up with the idea for Netflix during their commutes to work where they would car share.
Randolph was inspired by Amazon, which back then was still a website to buy and order books. They originally wanted to rent and sell VHS tapes but they were too expensive to stock and too brittle to deliver across America.
The same year of Netflix’s inception in 1997, the DVD was introduced to the United States and the pair found their portable item in which they can sell or rent video content that was fairly cheap to transport and wouldn’t shatter to pieces in the process.
Hastings invested $2.5 million into the company and Netflix launched their website with just 30 employees and 925 titles in their library. During their infancy the pair met with Jeff Bezos to discuss the possibility of a sale to Amazon, but Hastings refused the $14 to $16 million offer. During it’s nascent years, Netflix initially offered customers the option to rent each DVD but soon introduced the subscription model in 1999.
It wasn’t plain sailing however, in the year 2000 Netflix was suffering losses and the co-founders offered Netflix to another thriving video rental service called Blockbuster.
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$50 million was the price for sale, however, in what is now a notorious decision, Blockbuster CEO at the time John Antioco described the proposition as a “joke” and laughed it away.
In the late noughties, Netflix evolved, moving from web browsers to games consoles and smart TVs, before launching on Apple and Nintendo products in 2010.
Since then it has seen nothing but success thanks to the video-on-demand boom that was revolutionised by Youtube and the subscription service that it perfected itself.
Today, it offers content in over 60 languages, with reports suggesting that as of October last year, it had a catalogue of over 17,000 titles - including a huge collection of original movies and shows, early work being House of Cards and Orange is the New Black.
The company has since seen unparalleled success in that sector with other major corporations such as Disney, Apple and Amazon following their lead and creating their own streaming sites.
Did you ever use Netflix when it was DVDs in the post?
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