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Netflix And The Video Rental Industry

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Introduction Netflix is the pioneer of digital video content received through the Internet. Before Netflix, people had to rent physical copies of movies at physical stores, such as Blockbuster and Family Video. When Netflix first arrived on the scene, they offered the public physical copies of movies through the mail. They then began offering an online video streaming service that now has original Netflix content. Netflix has been disruptive in the video rental industry and the cable television industry. They played a large role in helping the largest video rental place, Blockbuster, go out of business, and now they are disrupting cable television due to their popular original content and vast video streaming library. History of Netflix Netflix was co-founded in California in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph (Barr, 2015). Hastings, who is now the face of the company, was born in Boston, Massachusetts and was a one-time teacher of mathematics in Swaziland (Barr, 2015). Randolph, on the other hand, had experience in computer mail ordering in his previous company Micro Warehouse (Barr, 2015). Hastings had the vision Netflix as a company able to deliver movies via the Internet, hence the name “Net” (Internet) “flix” (movies) (Barr, 2015). Netflix originally began operation as an online movie rental store that charged per rental and had late fees (Allen, Feils, & Disbrow, 2014). In 1999, Netflix started their subscription service that provided unlimited DVD rentals

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