29 Aug: How Netflix Began
When Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Reed Hastings and Mark Randolph registered the website that would become Netflix on 29th August, 1997, they named it ‘Kibble’ after a previous idea they had for a dogfood company. But their new concept – mailing DVDs out in the post – would become one of the big success stories of the dotcom era.
To test the model, they sent a Patsy Cline CD through the mail; within a year, they had 30 employees and a growing library of nearly 1,000 DVDs.
Their first day saw them ship 137 DVDs, crashing their servers from unexpected demand. Despite the challenges, by 2005, they were mailing out a million DVDs a day, making Netflix a significant player in the DVD rental market – and positioning them perfectly to revolutionise the industry all over again with online streaming.
In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explain why Blockbuster (the then-giant in movie rentals) turned down the opportunity to buy up Netflix for just $50 million; consider Hastings’ apocryphal origin story; and reveal how the founders created not one, but two game-changing TV companies…
Further Reading:
• ‘Netflix: Did one late video really bring down Blockbuster empire?
(News.com.au, 2020): https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/other-industries/true-story-behind-netflixs-rise-and-the-downfall-of-blockbuster/news-story/407f8f2305d2800125b3cc9329c48bc4
• ‘Netflix’s 20th Anniversary Is Nice, But It Doesn’t Matter’ (WIRED, 2017): https://www.wired.com/story/netflix-20th-anniversary/
• ‘Netflix ad’ (Netflix, 1998):