Netflix | Founders, History, Shows, & Facts (2024)

Netflix, media-streaming and video-rental company founded in 1997 by American entrepreneurs Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. It is also involved in the creation of original programming. Corporate headquarters are in Los Gatos, California.

In 1999 Netflix began offering an online subscription service through the Internet. Subscribers chose movie and television titles from Netflix’s Web site; the shows were then mailed to customers in the form of DVDs, along with prepaid return envelopes, from one of more than 100 distribution centres. Although customers typically rented for a flat monthly fee as many movies per month as they wished, the number of DVDs in their possession at any one time was limited according to their subscription plans. Netflix had tens of thousands of movie titles in its catalog.

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In 2006 Netflix launched the $1 million Netflix Prize contest to see if anyone could improve by 10 percent its recommendation system, an algorithm for predicting an individual’s movie preferences based on previous rental data. Three years later the prize was awarded to BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, a team made up of seven mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers from the United States, Canada, Austria, and Israel.

In 2007 Netflix began offering subscribers the option to stream some of its movies and television shows directly to their homes through the Internet. For most subscription plans, the streaming service was unlimited. Netflix subsequently partnered with manufacturers of various consumer electronics products, including video game consoles and Blu-ray Disc players, in order to enable its videos to be streamed over an Internet connection to those devices. In 2010 Netflix introduced a streaming-only plan that offered unlimited streaming service but no DVDs. Netflix then expanded beyond the United States by offering the streaming-only plan in Canada in 2010, in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2011, and in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Scandinavia in 2012. By 2016 its streaming service was available in more than 190 countries and territories. Netflix had announced in September 2011 that it would split its streaming and mail-based services, with the latter to be called Qwikster, but abandoned the planned split a month later, citing an outcry from its subscribers. While its streaming services became the biggest revenue generator—with more than 200 million subscribers in 2021—the rental division remained profitable.

Beginning in 2013 with the episodic drama series House of Cards (ended 2018), the company offered video content produced specifically for its streaming service. Such content became a major focus of Netflix, and by the end of 2021 it had offered more than 2,400 original titles. Its notable series included Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–20), a comedy about a woman rescued from a doomsday cult; Narcos (2015–17), about drug trafficker Pablo Escobar and the DEA agents hunting him, one of whom was played by Pedro Pascal; Stranger Things (2016– ), a sci-fi drama set in the 1980s; The Crown (2016– ), a drama about the British royal family; Bridgerton (2020– ), an adaptation of a romance book series set in 19th-century London; and Squid Game (2021– ), a South Korean show about a bloody survival game. Netflix also produced numerous movies—notably Roma (2018), which won three Academy Awards, including best foreign language film.