How Netflix Began

Today In History with The Retrospectors

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): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akWxRqObbEM

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