Netflix has reported a surge of subscribers to 117m in 2017, which it's put down

to interest in its original content.

The company has come a long way since its start as an online DVD rental company
in 1998.

Back then you could subscribe and have access to unlimited DVDs which would be
sent to your house.

It was the main rival to Blockbuster - a major chain that rented films, games and TV
box sets

Pressing play

From 700,000 Netflix subscribers in 2002 to 3.6m in 2005, there was clearly a demand
for DVD rental.

Two years later, in 2007, America saw the launch of the feature Netflix is best known
for - streaming.

That year also saw the beginnings of a move away from the traditional DVD rental
format.

The company's founders are said to have had the idea of streaming much earlier, but
slow internet speeds mean it wouldn't have worked.

Over the next three years the company's streaming facilities began to be supported
on different games consoles, handheld devices and TVs.

And up until this point it was something only Americans were enjoying.

Going global

But in 2010 Netflix became available in Canada, with Latin America and the Caribbean
being added the following year.

That was the same year that Netflix began creating its own original content - starting
with House of Cards, which debuted in 2013.

Stranger Things, Glow, Orange Is The New Black and The Crown are just some of the
other successful Netflix Originals since.

Netflix used to have a production department called Red Envelope Entertainment that
played a prominent role in the broadcast of independent films, but it closed in 2008.

In 2012, fifteen years after Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded the company,
Netflix became available in the UK.
Not just Netflix

There have been many different rivals to Netflix throughout the years.

Only one year before Netflix became available in the UK, the 'Netflix of Europe' -
LoveFilm - was bought by Amazon.

The same year Amazon added video streaming to its Prime subscription.

LoveFilm folded completely into Amazon's Prime Video offering in 2014 - and the
physical DVD rental aspect closed entirely in October 2017.

Amazon Prime has also more recently been releasing successful original material like
The Grand Tour.

Amazon says it has "millions" of subscribers to its Prime services.

(source: bbc.co.uk Tuesday 23 January 2018)

NETFLIX has become the dominant player in the video-on-demand streaming market but
things could’ve been a little different if Janet Jackson didn’t have her famous nip slip at the
Superbowl in 2004.

Let me explain.

Netflix started out as a company which posted DVDs to its customers. In fact, last
year 4.2 million people in the US who still rented physical DVDs via the post from
Netflix, down from its peak of 20 million in 2010.

However, Netflix was always keenly aware that the rise of the internet offered
immense opportunity for its business.

“Around the time of YouTube’s founding in 2005, I was working at Netflix,” wrote
Robert Kyncl for Recode.

“One day, my bosses, Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings, asked for a volunteer to
help lead a new side project: Instead of mailing out physical DVDs to customers,
could we figure out a way for our customers to view films and TV shows digitally,
over the internet?”

According to Mr Kyncl, who is now the Chief Business Officer at YouTube, Netflix
began working on a “Netflix box” for the home to enable customers to download
movies in their living room but the company ran into difficulties creating the box and
acquiring the rights to download movies.
Then YouTube came along and changed the game. Lots of the videos uploaded to
the site were of poor quality but it was the convenience and ease of access that
clearly resulted in huge numbers of viewers.

“YouTube clearly demonstrated that people were willing to trade fidelity for
convenience and speed. Witnessing the popularity of YouTube was a revelation. And
it caused us to stop our launch and pivot to a service that would allow consumers to
stream movies remotely instead of downloading them,” Mr Kyncl wrote.

“Finally, in 2007, we launched Netflix streaming because we saw the potential that
YouTube presented.”

So, what does a nipple slip have to do with anything?

Well, the catalyst for the Netflix streaming service was seeing the success and
potential of YouTube. And the catalyst for YouTube was, well, boobs.

YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim reportedly started
workshopping the idea at a dinner party in San Francisco in 2004.

As Jawed Karim told USA Today in 2006, YouTube was partially inspired by Janet Jackson’s
famous nipple slip during the half time show of the Superbowl in 2004, as well as a tsunami
event in Asia that same year. More specifically, it was borne out of the fact that it wasn’t
particularly easy at the time to find videos of those events online.

As USA Today wrote: “Karim recalled the difficulty involved in finding and watching
videos online of Jackson accidentally baring her breast during the Super Bowl show.”

And as the saying goes, necessity is the father of invention.

There are, of course, an almost infinite number of other forces and factors which
resulted in Netflix becoming the streaming king, but nonetheless this particular flap of
the butterfly’s wings is an easy one to trace, and at the very least a fun thought
experiment.

So, when you sit down to watch the latest Rick and Morty on Netflix this weekend, be
thankful that Janet Jackson accidentally exposed her breast to the world on live TV
and at least one young man was determined to help people watch videos of it.

And progress marches on.

(source: news.com.au Thursday 14 September 2017)

Netflix announced some seriously impressive numbers on Wednesday.

Worldwide membership grew to 93.8 million (which is equivalent to more than 17 times
the population of Scotland) after 19 million people signed up in the last 12 months -
seven million of those in the final quarter of the year. The 100 million barrier could
easily be surpassed before its next quarterly announcement.

Those figures mean it’s true reach could be close to a quarter of a billion people as
research from advertising data firm eMarketer shows that 2.5 people watch each
account.

These are not the only eye-catching numbers in Netflix’s rapid rise from a mail order
DVD rental service in 1997 to become the dominant global video streaming service.

A year ago, the company announced plans for global domination as it launched
simultaneously in more than 130 countries, meaning it now reaches almost every
nation on the planet.

That plan now appears to be bearing fruit. Non-US subscriber growth drove the latest
results, with 5.12 million of the quarter’s new subscribers coming from outside its home
market. Almost half of its members are now in countries other than the US.

Meteoric rise

Netflix only started making original programmes in 2013 but said it will shell out $6bn
on new productions in 2017. That’s enough to make the most expensive film ever
made 18 times (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, in case you were
wondering).

It's also almost enough to match the $7bn spent by all of the major Hollywood studios
combined in 2015.

The vast budget has created some hugely popular shows such as supernatural thriller
Stranger Things and royal drama The Crown. Five of the top ten most searched TV
programmes globally in 2016 were made by Netflix.

It doesn’t release country-by-country data but March 2016 research from TV ratings
firm Barb found nearly a quarter of the UK’s households subscribed to Netflix - it only
launched in Britain four years earlier.

Globally, the company has a big lead in subscription numbers over its rivals, despite
a blip when it after it announced price rises in April 2016. Amazon Prime has more than
20 million fewer subscribers, at around 70 million, but experts estimate that only
around 40 per cent actually use its video service. Fellow challenger Hulu has relatively
paltry 12 million subscribers.

In the US, the company gobbles up 35.7 per cent of all streaming traffic, according to
a March 2016 report in Fortune.
Netflix’s astonishing rise has perhaps even been too rapid for its own good.
Unsurprisingly it has hurt sales of DVDs, raising questions over whether it is
cannibalising the older format.

A study published in January illustrated how badly the streaming service has hit DVD
revenues and how dominant Netflix has become in the online streaming market.

Researchers at a group of Hong Kong Universities looked at the case of Epix

entertainment network, which distributes films including the Hunger Games and
Transformers film series.

In August 2015, Epix pulled its content from Netflix and moved it to Hulu meaning far
fewer people could stream it. In the following three months, DVD sales of Epix titles
rose by 24.7 per cent, raising the question of whether Netflix is simply too popular and
the prospect that other providers could consider removing or withholding titles in order
to maximise revenues.

But that number has apparently not bothered investors - the company’s share price.

(source: independent.co.uk Thursday 19 January 2017)

Netflix by numbers:

Total amount of hours watched in 2015

42 billion

Number of new subscribers in 2016

19 million

Number of countries it’s available in

190

Revenues in 2016

$8.3 billion (+35 per cent on 2015)

Amount committed to producing original programmes in 2017

$6 billion

Estimated hours of adverts users avoid annually by streaming*

160

Number of hours of original content to be added in 2017

1,000