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Concept
Netflix
Summary
Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service owned and operated by Netflix, Inc. The service primarily distributes films and television series produced by the media company of the same name from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple languages.
Netflix was launched on January 16, 2007, nearly a decade after Netflix, Inc. began its DVD-by-mail service. With 238.39 million paid memberships in more than 190 countries, it is the most-subscribed video on demand streaming service. By 2022, original productions accounted for half of Netflix's library in the United States, and the company had ventured into other categories, such as video game publishing via the Netflix service.
Netflix was founded by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings on August 29, 1997, in Scotts Valley, California. Hastings, a computer scientist and mathematician, was a cofounder of Pure Software, which was acquired by Rational Software that year for $750 million, the then biggest acquisition in Silicon Valley history. Randolph had worked as a marketing director for Pure Software after Pure Atria acquired a company where Randolph worked. He was previously a co-founder of MicroWarehouse, a computer mail-order company as well as vice president of marketing for Borland. Hastings and Randolph came up with the idea for Netflix while carpooling between their homes in Santa Cruz, California, and Pure Atria's headquarters in Sunnyvale. Patty McCord, later head of Human Resources at Netflix, was also in the carpool group. Randolph admired Amazon and wanted to find a large category of portable items to sell over the Internet using a similar model. Hastings and Randolph considered and rejected selling and renting VHS as too expensive to stock and too delicate to ship. When they heard about DVDs, first introduced in the United States in early 1997, they tested the concept of selling or renting DVDs by mail by mailing a compact disc to Hastings's house in Santa Cruz.
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