Netflix was founded by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings on August 29th 1997 in California. Hastings was one of the co-founders of Pure Atria, a big software corporation which was acquired for 700 million dollars, which was the biggest acquisition at the time. Randolph had worked as a marketing director for Pure Atria, and he and Hastings often carpooled together. This is also where the idea for Netflix came up. Randolph had an admiration for Amazon, and wanted to sell portable items to sell over the Internet, just like Amazon. VHS Tapes where too expensive to ship at the time, but when the both heard about DVDs, which were just introduced at the time, they though it could work. They tested the concept by renting out DVDs via mail, and when the DVD returned undamaged, Hastings and Randolph decided to enter the industry of home-video sales and rental. It is often said that they came up with the idea because Hastings was fined 40 dollar at a blockbuster store for returning Apollo 13 too late, but this story was created to explain th e business model of Netflix.
The idea thus resulted in Netflix, the first online website that rented out DVDs, using the mail and a traditional pay-per-rent model. People would pay Netflix a fee and in return they would receive a DVD in their mail, which could be sent back a couple of days later. This was convenient for people that did not have a rental store nearby. Rentals cost around $4 each, plus a $2 postage charge. At the time that Netflix started, there were 925 titles available for rent, which was almost the entire catalogue of DVDs at the time.
After significant growth, Netflix switched to a subscriber-based model in 2000. This allowed customers to have the DVD as long as they want, but it should be returned if they wanted a new DVD. DVD players became a popular gift for holiday sales in late 2001, and this resulted in a growing demand for the Netflix DVD rental service. The company eventually became a public company on May 29, 2002, selling 5.5 million shares of common stock at 15 dollars per share.
Netflix competed in the 2000s with Blockbuster, the brick-and-mortar rental giant. Netflix approached Blockbuster for a partnership, and Hastings and Randolph even offered to sell the company to Blockbuster for 50 million dollars, but that was turned down by Blockbuster. Blockbuster also introduced a DVD rental service in 2004, and it did draw some business away from Netflix for a while. Though, Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010, with many claiming that Netflix “killed” the company.

In 2007, Netflix introduced its famous streaming service, which was called “Watch Now” at the time, which allowed which allows subscribers to watch television shows and movies on their personal computers. Though, at the time there were only 1000 movies available for streaming, compared to 100.00 movies available on DVD. Netflix was careful at the time, as they felt that DVDs would be around for a long time. But in 2008, all rental-disc subscribers became entitled to unlimited streaming at no additional costs. It was soon clear that streaming was the future, as Netflix streams overtook DVD shipments in 2009. The company grew its library of content for streaming over the years, and eventually Netflix separated the DVD-rental service from the streaming service in 2011.
Over the years, Netflix have been growing quickly in amount of subscribers, and announced a lot of deals with production companies, and even started making movies and series by themselves. Netflix won several emmy’s for series like House of Cards, Stranger Things, The Crown and The Queen’s Gambit and also oscars for movies like Roma, Marriage Story and Icarus

Now in 2021, Netflix seems to be more relevant then ever, as Squid Game, the new hit-series by Netflix gained over three million streams in 2 weeks.
So, what is your favorite series on Netflix?

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