Startup.Com Movie Reaction Paper

Netflix was founded in 1997 with the intent to revolutionize the way in which consumers watch movies and television shows. Their accomplishments both in innovation and in customer base for their service indicate that the firm has been, and continues to be, successful in doing so. Currently, the

Startup.com is a documentary film about govWorks.com, a start-up tech company that operated between May 1999 and December 2000. The company raised $60 million US dollars from various venture capitals and was thought to become a million-dollar business that will go public on the stock exchanges. Unfortunately, the company did not survive when the dot com bubble bursted. The company was founded by two best friends since high school, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman. Their friendship also fell apart as the company came to an end. govWorks.com was acquired by a multinational corporation on New Year’s Day 2001 due to the company’s rapidly depleting cash flow and inability to get more funding.

Blockbuster Entertainment, Inc. was once a highly successful and profitable brick and mortar home movie and video game rental store. At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster had up to 60,000 employees and more than 9,000 stores. The idea behind Netflix came from an unsatisfied, embarrassed customer of Blockbuster, Mr. Reed Hastings, now CEO of Netflix, paid a $40 late fee because he returned the movie Apollo 13 six weeks later (Zarafshar, 2013). He began to contemplate ingeniously about a notion to change the movie-leasing pattern into a more pioneering industry. In 1997 Netflix was started as a DVD rental-by-mail business without subscriptions. In 1999, taking a stride additional in the direction of evolving the industry, Hastings began the subscription-based business mode based on renting DVDs by mail with plans reliant on the quantity of titles taken at a time. Netflix put forward 120,000 titles for limitless monthly DVD rental with free shipping no late and per title fees. Since that time Netflix has become one of the most popular subscription services in the world, and is now valued at over $28 billion and steadily increasing. What factors contributed to the success and failure of these two companies?

1. Netflix’s original marketing strategy offered several flat-rate monthly subscription options; in which, members could stream movies and shows via the Internet or have disks sent to their homes in a pre-paid and pre-addressed envelope. Free from the despair of due dates and late fees, members could keep, up to, eight movies at a time. Upon the return of a disk, Netflix would automatically mail out the next movie from the customer’s video queue. Members were able to change and update their queues as frequently as they liked. The sheer innovation of Netflix’s strategy encouraged several competitors to enter the market to compete directly,

Technology innovation – Netflix can work their way around the slow broadband by creating new ways to help the consumer save more data

First formed in 1991, Netflix has become today’s predominant video rental service. They offer a hybrid service allowing DVD delivery by mail as well as streaming movies and TV shows via their company website or access on 200 other devices. Their unique business process has netted them over 16 million subscribers and revenue around $500 million annually. The reason for their growing success can be attributed to a good business model and just as important, properly implemented systems. An extremely efficient supply chain management system (SCM) and customer relationship management system (CRM) have helped Netflix become the world’s largest video subscription service.

Netflix grew its customer base through advertisements, sales promotions, marketing alliances, direct marketing, and public relations. Advertising campaigns used not only traditional media platforms like television, but also innovative Internet forms of media. Affiliate networks directed customers to “www.netflix.com” by simply allowing

Growing competition as a challenge represents the various companies that are now entering the market of online media-streaming. Companies such as HBO, Amazon, Google, and Hulu Plus have all began to offer media-streaming on the same electronic devices as Netflix, Inc. Currently Netflix, Inc. remains in the lead amongst its competitors; however, there is no guarantee that this advancement is a permanent one. It is inevitable that emerging companies will come up with creative ideas to gain the competitive edge and receive more consumers. For example, Amazon.com has “amplified

Netflix began in 1997 as a revolutionary idea by CEO Reed Hastings and software executive March Randolph. Before long, in 1999 Netflix launched its major line of business, the online subscription service, which radically changed the way consumers viewed movies and television. For a young company in an innovative and growing industry, Netflix has set itself up for a tremendous journey. The company has had much success due to its adaption of a modern business model and strength in operations management. Its continued reliance on and improvements of operation management principles is necessary to continue growing and bringing in profits.

Commins was the go-to person throughout the company when work and/or personal issues arose. Don Head, marketing manager, “was considered a ruthless operator” and seemed to be more trouble than he was worth (McShane & Von Glinow, 2013). Yet he contributed to the continuous rising sales and was a marketing guru. Jason Palu, production manager, “was a soft-spoken man” who worked hard to get to his current position (McShane & Von Glinow, 2013). Although revered for his expertise and efficiency, his autocratic mindset left many of his staff jaded. Heather Berkowitz, chief webpage designer, had a very eclectic work lifestyle. She dressed provocatively, had blue hair, and seldom arrived to work before 11:00am. Yet, like many of the others, her quality and quantity of work outweighed her undoubtedly unprofessional demeanor.

As the world entered into the 21st Century, humanity has witnessed an ecology of innovation that ranges from artificial hearts and livers to iPods to Bluetooth technology to smartphones and many more ("21st Century Inventions That Made an Impact”). Each with its own unique attraction has become a catalyst in nature for how individuals think, act and live. Along with these state of the art developments, Netflix has become the cutting – edge service for internet streaming media. Deemed as “a worthless piece of crap” from Wall Street analysts, Netflix with tremendous leadership gained control of their industry and swiftly transformed the delivery of movie rentals ("How Netflix Beat Blockbuster: An Exemplar of Emerging Technologies”). Faced with impossible odds, we will discover how Netflix was able to survive, conquer and prosper as the emerging technology in their industry.

Starting a business is the latest trend. Just take a look at Instagram. Several profiles have the caption ‘Entrepreneur’. At this very moment, there is someone, somewhere working on an idea, a business plan or launching a startup. Entrepreneurship is on the rise like never before. The flexibility and independence that comes with being one’s own boss is attractive and worth taking the leap in starting a business. However, most people don’t know that being an entrepreneur is a grueling journey that can be very lonely and stressful at times. According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), 50% of businesses fail during the first year. Starting a business can be a scary task, but the

Netflix exhibits dominant economic characteristics in the online movie rental business. They enjoy strong market size and growth rate when compared to rivalry competition. The number of rivalries are increasing, and the market remains dominated by only a few sizeable rivalries like Blockbuster Video, Wal-Mart, Walt Disney Movies and Movielink’s Downloadable Movies. Netflix is determined to offer new and innovative technology to sustain their competitive advantage.

Today, digital technology and the Internet are deeply reshaping the motion picture industry with a trend toward the digitalisation and disintermediation (Zhu, 2010). Media streaming services are an example of this current restructuration. Providing an access to a wide collection of entertainment online at a cheap price, they have penetrated the monopoly that cinema once enjoyed (Herberg, 2017). A significant example can be found in the US company ‘Netflix’, source of nearly a third of all North American downstream internet traffic at peak hours (Hallinan & Striphas, 2016). Once a small DVD subscription service created in 1997, it offers today to its subscribers to watch its own produced movies and shows as well as content of other

Netflix was founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in 1997 and was originally based out of Scotts Valley California. The business model that they were working towards was to create a company that would offer online movie rental service made available by streaming media as well as DVD’s that could be ordered online and delivered to the customers’ homes. (Wheelen, Case 12). Netflix had a strategic plan to undercut the competition in an effort to stress the market and force weaker competition out of the field. This was a very successful plan and over a period of years it was able to force the closings of most of its competing market to include the mega giant Blockbuster video. Using a business