Streaming Services (Netflix)

Streaming Services

(Netflix)

Netflix would be a North American company that was founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph on August 29 1997 in Scott’s valley California. The main focus of the service is to provide streaming media, video-on-demand online and DVD by mail.

History (1997)

Back in 1997 the idea of Netflix came to Marc Randolph when he was charged a $40 late fee for “Apollo 13” and he decided to set up his own service where people could rent films and thus the following year Netflix was available online for consumers to rent video.

Netflix would have be a main rival to Blockbuster that specialised in film, games and T.V box sets, also in 1998 if you were to subscribe to them you would have access to unlimited DVDs, which would then be sent to your house.

By 2002 Netflix had about 700,000 subscribers, which raised to about 3.6 million in 2005, so clearly there was a demand for DVD rental.

As the years went by Netflix became more and more dominant over the market and surpassed blockbusters in the amount of DVD rentals and subscribers.

Two years later Netflix launched their streaming service online that Netflix would be known for today and that same year they also move away from traditional DVDs rentals and focus more on streaming films to their subscribers, this hurt their competitor blockbuster’s, since that Netflix was now more convenient for people to rent film by streaming them online than to go out and pick up film to rent at blockbuster’s.

The founders of the Netflix mentioned that they had the idea of streaming films to the viewer in their home back when they first set up the Network but dew to bandwidth limitation at that time, it was impossible to stream a film over the internet.

Below there is a link to a video of the history of Netflix.
Video Link

Now (2007)

Netflix would currently be the leader of online digital entertainment and has completely replaced T.V for the majority of people, with popular show such as the House Of Cards that released in 2013 only available on Netflix. No other streaming service can even catch up to Netflix’s growth over the past two decades with Netflix Inc. NFLX +5.58% the shares of Netflix jumped more than 6% in after hour trading Monday as the streaming service reported better profit and subscriber additions than expected Netflix said that they have added 7.4 million new subscribers in the first quarter of this year, when it had a profit of 290.1 million or 64 cents a shares with a revenue of 3.7 billion.

Netflix’s global expansion on their product took a major leap with adding 130 new countries and Netflix would be now available is over 190 countries around the world, but because of the licensing deals the shows that are usually shown in the US for example, can be unwatchable in other countries due to sexual content or overly violent content and some shows may even be banned for this very reason and under 40% of Netflix’s titles out of 13,500 are available in its US catalogue, more than what would be available in any other country.

When it comes to viewing Netflix shows in other countries it is next to impossible to have a US account and try to watch your favourite Netflix show on your fantastic get away to another countries, you will just have to rely on the classic television for your entertainment needs due to the copyright laws that may be on the content that you are trying to view and thus Netflix will block your account in other countries, because for example if you’re a large corporation like Disney or DreamWorks that spend up to million on the production of just one feature length film then they would want some kind of ROL (Return Of Investment) on their product to try to get some of that cost back from the production.

Netflix has come a long way since it first began in 1997 as an online DVD rental store and over the years slowly moved over to steaming content in 2007 only made possible as the speed of the bandwidth increased, ten years from the official opening of the service and 2007 would have been a major milestone for the company to finally have fast enough bandwidth to keep up with steaming video because in the late 90s the average person could barely download a photograph without running into a bandwidth bottleneck. After Netflix launched their steaming service no other steaming provider could catch up to Netflix’s success, other steaming services have tried to catch up to Netflix popularity like Hulu, however other steaming such as Hulu are successful but fail to surpass or even be as popular as Netflix is currently, but just because another steaming service can not quite get the same popularity as Netflix does they do offer something really important to the market and that is competition to help keep Netflix becoming a monopoly and start charging whatever they want for their service, due to customers having no other option but Netflix as a steaming provider, so other steaming services do not need the same popularity as Netflix to be successful but to offer competitive prices for their steaming compared to Netflix in order to keep price low for the consumer.

Coclusion
Netflix would be by far one of the most popular streaming platforms since blockbuster rental video stores and even arguably one of the best streaming platforms that is currently available. Netflix would also have the most peak traffic of any of the other steaming platforms that may rival the company. There are rumor going around that if Disney manages to start up their own streaming platform that Netflix may lose a large chunk of their customers with up to 30% of people watching Netflix, watch Disney created shows and if Disney did create their own streaming platform then they would pull their content off Netflix.