I’ll Only Watch One More… (Blog Post #6)

 

Are You Still Watching?

 

 

            We have all had that moment of weakness, where we are intensely watching a show late at night and there are only a few episodes left so we say just one more episode…then five hours and a bag of chips later we are still watching that very same show. It is exciting to start a new show and watch it all the way through. With streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu, we have at the tip of our fingers a library full of TV shows and movies from all sorts of genres.  But we never stop our tv show to think about just how incredibly these streaming services are or how they came to be. Which is why I am going to ask you to politely pause your tv show episode and read about a brief history of the creation of Netflix. 

 

            The two creators of Netflix are Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, in 1997 they realized just how many people may not live by video rental stores and are missing out on all the great cinema at the time. So, they thought of an idea, where a person could rent a DVD and have it sent straight to them. This brought up many fearful factors such as how to ship the DVD and how would they order the item. So they went through many test phases until that following year was the website titled “Netflix”launched. Netflix was a absolute hit. So much so that the two developed a subscription service in 1999. Netflix went through several iterations constantly utilizing the profit to personalize and advance their brand.

 

            As technology improved and the more subscribers to the service, they developed another idea to allow movies and tv shows to be streamed directly on the site. Which is exactly what they did in 2007. At this point in time Netflix is looking a little more similar to what it is today.  The brand eventually began being placed on everything: blue ray players to TV remotes, Netflix became the most popular streaming service in the world.

 

            Today is February 8, 2022 and Netflix has surpasses 200 million subscription services. It is truly incredible what two men accomplished in such as short amount of time. It is not something we think about all too often while watching our tv shows or movies on the platform.

 

            Now get back to your show! I know you are eager to see what happens next.