Netflix

**Netflix** is a global provider of streaming films and television series, in this Wiki's case, *Fuller House* consists of one of the many Netflix original shows. Netflix started as an American DVD-by-mail service in 1998, and began streaming in 2007. Netflix expanded with streaming to Canada in 2010 and now serves over 190 countries. Netflix's first widely advertised original series was *House of Cards*, which debuted in 2013, and Netflix now produces hundreds of hours of original programming around the world. The company was established in 1997 and is headquartered in Los Gatos, California.

As of April 2016, Netflix reported over 81 million subscribers worldwide, including more than 46 million in the U.S.

## History

Netflix was founded in 1997 in Scotts Valley, California by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, who previously had worked together at Pure Software. Randolph was a co-founder of MicroWarehouse, a computer mail order company; and was later employed by Borland International as vice president of marketing. Hastings, who once worked as a math teacher, had founded Pure Software, which he had recently sold for $700 million. Hastings invested $2.5 million in startup cash for Netflix. Randolph initially had the idea to start a company that sold something over the Internet, but just didn't know what.The idea of Netflix came to Hastings when he was forced to pay $40 in overdue fines after returning Apollo 13 well past its due date.He also remained a producer and a member of the board of directors for a large period of time until finally retiring in 2004 from Netflix.The Netflix website was launched on April 14, 1998 with only 30 employees and 925 works available for rent through a traditional pay-per-rental model (50¢US per rental U.S. postage; late fees applied). Netflix introduced the monthly subscription concept in September 1999, and then dropped the single-rental model in early 2000. Since that time, the company has built its reputation on the business model of flat-fee unlimited rentals without due dates, late fees, shipping and handling fees, or per title rental fees
Netflix logo used from 2000 to 2014
In 2000, Netflix was offered for acquisition to Blockbuster for $50 million; however, Blockbuster declined the offer. Netflix initiated an initial public offering (IPO) on May 29, 2002, selling 5.5 million shares of common stock at the price of US$15.00 per share. On June 14, 2002, the company sold an additional 825,000 shares of common stock at the same price. After incurring substantial losses during its first few years, Netflix posted its first profit during fiscal year 2003, earning US$6.5 million profit on revenues of US$272 million. In 2005, 35,000 different film titles were available, and Netflix shipped 1 million DVDs out every day.

Netflix developed and maintains an extensive personalized video-recommendation system based on ratings and reviews by its customers. On October 1, 2006, Netflix offered 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%.

Netflix envelope
In February 2007, the company delivered its billionth DVD and began to move away from its original core business model of mailing DVDs by introducing video on demand via the Internet. Netflix grew as DVD sales fell from 2006 to 2011.

Netflix has played a prominent role in independent film distribution. Through the division Red Envelope Entertainment, Netflix licensed and distributed independent films such as Born into Brothels and Sherrybaby. As of late 2006, Red Envelope Entertainment also expanded into producing original content with filmmakers such as John Waters. Netflix closed Red Envelope Entertainment in 2008, in part to avoid competition with its studio partners.

Netflix has been one of the most successful dot-com ventures. A September 2002 article from The New York Times said that at the time, that Netflix mailed about 190,000 discs per day to its 670,000 monthly subscribers. The company's published subscriber count increased from one million in the fourth quarter of 2002 to around 5.6 million at the end of the third quarter of 2006, to 14 million in March 2010. Netflix's growth has been fueled by the fast spread of DVD players in households; as of 2004, nearly two-thirds of U.S. homes had a DVD player. Netflix capitalized on the success of the DVD and its rapid expansion into U.S. homes, integrating the potential of the Internet and e-commerce to provide services and catalogs that brick and mortar retailers could not compete with. Netflix also operates an online affiliate program which has helped to build online sales for DVD rentals. The company offers unlimited vacation time for salaried workers and allows employees to take any amount of their paychecks in stock options.

By 2010, Netflix's streaming business had grown so quickly that within months the company had shifted from the fastest-growing customer of the United States Postal Service's first-class mail service to the biggest source of Internet traffic in North America in the evening. In November of that year, it began offering a standalone streaming service separate from DVD rentals. On September 18, 2011, Netflix announced its intentions to rebrand and restructure its DVD home media rental service as an independent subsidiary company called Qwikster, totally separating the DVD rental and streaming services. Andy Rendich, a 12-year veteran of Netflix, would have been appointed the CEO of Qwikster. The new service would carry video games whereas Netflix did not. However, in October 2011, Netflix announced that it would retain its DVD service under the name Netflix and would not, in fact, create Qwikster for that purpose.

On October 24, 2011, Netflix announced it lost 800,000 subscribers in the U.S. during the third quarter of 2011 and more subscriber losses were expected in the fourth quarter of 2011. Despite the losses, earnings for Netflix jumped 63 percent for the third quarter of 2011. On January 26, 2012, Netflix said it added 610,000 subscribers in the U.S. by the end of the fourth quarter of 2011, totaling 24.4 million U.S. subscribers for this time period.

In April 2012, Netflix filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to form a political action committee (PAC) called FLIXPAC. Politico referred to the Los Gatos, California-based PAC as "another political tool with which to aggressively press a pro-intellectual property, anti-video-piracy agenda."The hacktivist group Anonymous called for a boycott of Netflix following the news. Netflix spokesperson Joris Evers indicated that the PAC was not set up to support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), tweeting that the intent was to "engage on issues like net neutrality, bandwidth caps, UBB and VPPA."

On December 24, 2012, at around 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, a number of Amazon Web Services servers crashed, affecting numerous services including Netflix "instant streaming". The outage lasted more than 20 hours.

In February 2013, Netflix announced it would be hosting its own awards ceremony, The Flixies. On March 13, 2013, Netflix announced it would add a Facebook sharing feature to the Netflix interface, letting subscribers in the U.S. see lists of content "Watched by your friends" and "Friends' Favorites" once they agree to share. This was not legal until the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act was modified at the beginning of 2013.

On July 14, 2015, at the close of trading, Netflix did a 7-for-1 stock split by giving all shareholders an additional six shares of stock, effectively dropping the stock price to $100.

In January 2016, Netflix announced it would begin blocking virtual private networks (VPN)