# Timeline of Netflix

Netflix Inc. is an American technology & media-services provider and production company headquartered in Los Gatos, California, founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California. This is an abridged history of the formation and growth of Netflix, which has grown to become the largest entertainment company in the United States in terms of market capitalization as of 2020.

## Full timeline

| Year | Month and date | Event type | Details |
| 1997 | August 29 | Company | Netflix founded in Scotts Valley, California, by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, who previously had worked together at Pure Software |
| 1998 | April 14 | Product | Netflix launches its website with 925 titles available for rent through a traditional pay-per-rental model (50¢US per rental U.S. postage; late fees applied). |
| 1999 | September | Product | Netflix launches its monthly subscription concept. |
| 2000 | | Company | Netflix offers itself for acquisition to Blockbuster for $50 million; however, Blockbuster declines the offer. |
| 2002 | | Competition | Redbox is founded. It offers DVD rentals via automated retail kiosks. A year later, it poaches Mitch Lowe, who was a founding executive at Netflix. |
| 2002 | May 29 | Company | Netflix initiates initial public offering (IPO), selling 5.5 million shares of common stock at the price of US$15.00 per share. It brings in $82.5 million. |
| 2003 | April | Growth | Netflix announces that it reaches 1 million subscribers. |
| 2004 | August 11 | Competition | Blockbuster launches Blockbuster online to compete with Netflix, offering unlimited DVD rentals at the flat fee of $19.99/month. |
| 2006 | September 7 | Competition | |
| 2006 | October 1 | Company | Netflix offers a $1,000,000 prize to the first developer of a video-recommendation algorithm that could beat its existing algorithm, Cinematch, at predicting customer ratings by more than 10%. and uses the same 2016 icon |
| 2007 | January 15 | Product | Netflix announces that it will launch streaming video. |
| 2007 | February | Product | Netflix delivers its billionth DVD and begins to move away from its original core business model of mailing DVDs by introducing video on demand via the Internet. |
| 2008 | March 12 | Competition | Hulu, a competing online streaming service, launches for public access in the United States. |
| 2008 | August | Product | Netflix experiences a giant database corruption. This drives it to start moving all its data to the Amazon Web Services cloud. It completes its shift to the cloud by January 2016. |
| 2009 | June 12 | International | Netflix Originals was launched. |
| 2010 | September 22 | International | Netflix starts expanding its streaming service to the international market, starting with Canada." |
| 2010 | December | Legal | The FCC Open Internet Order bans cable television and telephone service providers from preventing access to competitors or certain web sites such as Netflix. |
| 2011 | April | Competition | Vudu announces the launch of its online streaming service. |
| 2011 | June | Team | Netflix CEO Reed Hastings joins Facebook's board of directors. |
| 2011 | September 5 | International | Netflix launches streaming service in Brazil |
| 2011 | September 7 | International | Netflix launches streaming service in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay |
| 2011 | September 8 | International | Netflix launches streaming service in Chile and Bolivia |
| 2011 | September 9 | International | Netflix launches streaming service in Andean region, including Peru and Ecuador |
| 2011 | September 12 | International | Netflix launches streaming service in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean |
| 2011 | September 18 | Product | Reed Hastings says in a Netflix blog post that the DVD section of Netflix would be split off and renamed Qwikster, and the only major change would be separate websites for the services. This change would be retracted a month later. |
| 2011 | November | Finance | Netflix stock plunges from 42.16/share in July to 9.12/share in November, as 800,000 subscribers quit. |
| 2012 | January 9 | International | Netflix starts its expansion in Europe, launching in the United Kingdom and Ireland. By September 18 it has expanded to Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. |
| 2012 | April | Company | Netflix files with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to form a political action committee (PAC) called FLIXPAC. |
| 2012 | December | Product | Netflix experiences massive Christmas Eve outage, due to its hosting on Amazon Web Services. Amazon issues apology several days later. |
| 2013 | February 1 | Product | Netflix starts streaming House of Cards, its first original content. |
| 2013 | August 1 | Product | Netflix announces a "Profiles" feature that permits accounts to accommodate up to five user profiles, associated either with individuals or themes of their choosing (e.g., "Date Night"). |
| 2013 | November | Competition | Dish Network announces that Blockbuster will close all remaining stores by the end of the year. |
| 2014 | February | Product | Netflix discovers that Comcast Cable has been slowing its traffic down, and announces that it will pay Comcast to end the slowdown. |
| 2014 | September 10 | Product | Netflix participates in the "Internet Slowdown" by intentionally slowing down its speeds, announcing its opposition to proposed changes in net neutrality rules that act against net neutrality by giving preferred websites the option to pay telecommunication companies for a guaranteed fast lane, in effect slowing down websites that don't pay for that fast lane. |
| 2015 | June 24 | Finance | Netflix announces a 7:1 stock split in form of a dividend of six additional shares for each outstanding share, payable on July 14 to stock owners of record at the July 2 close. Trading at the post-split price will start July 15. |
| 2015 | July | Finance | Netflix announces that its stock has surged to an all-time high (to almost $100/share), a growth of 574% over the past five years. |
| 2015 | September 2 | International | Netflix launches streaming service in Japan. |
| 2015 | October | Product | Netflix announces that it will raise the price of its standard HD plan to $10 per month, up from $9 per month for recent customers. This price hike will be gradually rolled in, a strategy it calls "un-grandfathering." |
| 2016 | January 6 | International | At the Consumer Electronics Show, Netflix announces a major international expansion into 130 new territories; with this expansion, the company promoted that its service would now be available nearly "worldwide", with the only notable exclusions including China, and regions subject to U.S. sanctions, such as Crimea (Ukraine), Syria, and North Korea. |
| 2016 | January | Product | Netflix announces that it will launch originals targeting kids. |
| 2016 | February 11 | Product | Netflix finishes its massive migration of its data servers to Amazon Web Services. |
| 2016 | March | Legal | Netflix states that it sends lower quality video to mobile subscribers on AT&T and Verizon's networks for the past 5 years. Some accuse Netflix of hypocrisy on net neutrality. |
| 2016 | May | Partnerships | Netflix partners with Univision to broadcast the first season of its original show Narcos - testing whether airing old seasons on traditional TV can lure people to sign up for its service ahead of the next season. |
| 2016 | November 30 | Product | After years of requests from subscribers, Netflix rolls out an offline playback feature to all of its subscribers in all of its markets. |
| 2017 | October | Competition | A study showed that the number of Netflix subscribers now equal that of all the cable subscribers combined; 73% of all US households. |
| 2018 | March | Company | Netflix created Netflix Animation as its first production studio. |
| 2019 | June–July | Content | Netflix announced that Friends and The Office will be leaving the platform within the United States to go to other streaming platforms. |
| 2021 | November | Product | Netflix launches its gaming platform Netflix Games, available on Android with 5 games on launch. The company also announces plans to expand its gaming service to iOS. |
| 2022 | January | Product | Netflix raises prices again and loses 1 million customers |
| 2022 | March | Acquisition | Netflix acquires Boss Fight Entertainment, a mobile games developer, their third game studio acquisition after Night School Studio and Next Games. |
| 2023 | January | Company | Reed Hastings steps down as CEO. |
| 2023 | April | Product | Netflix announces wind-down of DVD.com, with last shipment on September 29, 2023. |