Netflix
Netflix, Inc. is an American over-the-top content platform and production company headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California. The company's primary business is a subscription-based streaming service offering online streaming from a library of films and television series, including those produced in-house. In January 2021, Netflix reached 203.7 million subscribers, including 73 million in the United States. It is available worldwide except in the following: mainland China (due to local restrictions), Syria, North Korea, and Crimea (due to US sanctions). It was reported in 2020 that Netflix's operating income is $1.2 billion. The company has offices in France, Brazil, the Netherlands, India, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Netflix is a member of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), producing and distributing content from countries all over the globe.
As of October 2023, Netflix is the 24th most-visited website in the world with 23.66% of its traffic coming from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom at 5.84% and Brazil at 5.64%.
Netflix's initial business model included DVD sales and rental by mail, but Hastings abandoned the sales about a year after the company's founding to focus on the initial DVD rental business. Netflix expanded its business in 2007 with the introduction of streaming media while retaining the DVD and Blu-ray rental business. The company expanded internationally in 2010 with streaming available in Canada, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean. Netflix entered the content-production industry in 2013, debuting its first series House of Cards.
Since 2012, Netflix has taken more of an active role as producer and distributor for both film and television series, and to that end, offers a variety of "Netflix Original" content through its online library. By January 2016, Netflix services operated in more than 190 countries. Netflix released an estimated 126 original series and films in 2016, more than any other network or cable channel. Their efforts to produce new content, secure the rights for additional content, and diversify through 190 countries have resulted in the company racking up billions in debt: $21.9 billion as of September 2017, up from $16.8 billion from the previous year. $6.5 billion of this is long-term debt, with the remainder in long-term obligations. In October 2018, Netflix announced it would raise another $2 billion in debt to help fund new content. On July 10, 2020, Netflix became the largest entertainment/media company by market capitalization.
Netflix has been one of the most successful dot-com ventures. In September 2002, The New York Times reported that, at the time, 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 early growth was fueled by the fast spread of DVD players in households; in 2004, nearly two-thirds of United States homes had a DVD player. Netflix capitalized on the success of the DVD and its rapid expansion into United States homes, integrating the potential of the Internet and e-commerce to provide services and catalogs that bricks-and-mortar retailers could not compete with.
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 service to the largest source of Internet streaming traffic in North America.
On January 22, 2018, the company crossed $100 billion in market capitalization, becoming the largest digital media and entertainment company in the world, bigger than every traditional media company except for AT&T, Comcast and Disney and the 59th largest publicly traded company in the US S&P 500 Index.
According to Global Internet Phenomena Report Netflix consumes 15% of all Internet bandwidth globally, the most by any single application.