Timeline of Netflix

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This is a timeline of Netflix, a global provider of streaming films and television series.

Big picture

Time period Key developments at Netflix
1997-2006 Netflix is founded on a mail-rental DVD service, goes IPO, and faces vicious competition with Blockbuster.
2007 - 2015 Netflix starts its online subscription service in 2007 (a year after just over 50% of American households have broadband access), and online streaming ultimately forms the basis of Netflix's business model (as usage of DVDs starts declining). Netflix starts internationalization in 2010, reaches over 26 million subscribers worldwide by April 2011, 40.4 million subscribers by September 2013, and 81 million by April 2016. By 2015, it starts accounting for over one-third of all US Internet traffic.[1] As Blockbuster declines, Netflix's primary competition is with other online streaming services like Amazon Video and Hulu.

Full timeline

Year Month and date Event type Details
1997 August 29 Company Netflix founded in Scotts Valley, California by Marc Randolph[2][3] and Reed Hastings, who previously had worked together at Pure Software.
1998 April 14 Product Netflix launches its website [4] with 925 works available for rent through a traditional pay-per-rental model (50¢US per rental U.S. postage; late fees applied).[5]
1999 July Funding Netflix raises up $30 million in private equity.[6]
1999 September Product Netflix launches its monthly subscription concept.[7]
2000 Company Netflix offers itself for acquisition to Blockbuster for $50 million; however, Blockbuster declines the offer.[8]
2001 October Company Netflix announces that it will lay off one-third of its employees.
2002 Competition Redbox is founded. It offers DVD rentals via automated retail kiosks. A year later, it poaches Mitch Lowe, who was a founding executive at Netflix.
2002 May 29 Company Netflix initiates initial public offering (IPO), selling 5.5 million shares of common stock at the price of US$15.00 per share. It brings in $82.5 million.
2003 April Growth Netflix announces that it reaches 1 million subscribers.[9]
2004 August 11 Competition Blockbuster launches Blockbuster online to compete with Netflix, offering unlimited DVD rentals at the flat fee of $19.99/month.[10]
2006 September 7 Competition Amazon introduces video on demand service Amazon Video.
2006 October 1 Company Netflix offers a $1,000,000 prize to the first developer of a video-recommendation algorithm that could beat its existing algorithm, Cinematch, at predicting customer ratings by more than 10%.[11]
2007 January 15 Product Netflix announces that it will launch streaming video.[12]
2007 February Product Netflix delivers its billionth DVD[13] and begins to move away from its original core business model of mailing DVDs by introducing video on demand via the Internet.
2008 March 12 Competition Hulu, a competing online streaming service, launches for public access in the United States.[14]
2008 August Product Netflix experiences a giant database corruption. This drives it to shift moving all its data to the Amazon Web Services cloud. It finally shifts all its data to the cloud by January 2016. [15]
2010 September 22 International Netflix starts expanding its streaming service to the international market, starting with Canada."[16]
2010 December Legal The FCC Open Internet Order bans cable television and telephone service providers from preventing access to competitors or certain web sites such as Netflix.
2011 April Competition Vudu announces the launch of its online streaming service. [17]
2011 June Team Netflix CEO Reed Hastings joins Facebook's board of directors. [18]
2011 September 18 Product Reed Hastings says in a Netflix blog post that the DVD section of Netflix would be split off and renamed Qwikster, and the only major change would be separate websites for the services.[19] This change would be retracted a month later.
2011 November Finance Netflix stock plunges from 42.16/share in July to 9.12/share in November, as 800,000 subscribers quit. [20]
2012 January 4 International Netflix starts its expansion in Europe, launching in the United Kingdom and Ireland.[21] By September 18 it has expanded to Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.[22]
2012 April Company Netflix files with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to form a political action committee (PAC) called FLIXPAC.[23]
2012 December Product Netflix experiences massive Christmas Eve outage, due to its hosting on Amazon Web Services. Amazon issues apology several days later. [24]
2013 February 1 Product Netflix starts streaming House of Cards, its first original content.[25]
2013 August 1 Product Netflix announces a "Profiles" feature that permits accounts to accommodate up to five user profiles, associated either with individuals or themes of their choosing (e.g., "Date Night").
2013 November Competition Dish Networks announces that Blockbuster will close all remaining stores by the end of the year.[26]
2014 February Product Netflix discovers that Comcast Cable has been slowing its traffic down, and announces that it will pay Comcast to end the slowdown. [27]
2014 September 10 Product Netflix participates in the "Internet Slowdown" by intentionally slowing down its speeds, announcing its opposition to proposed changes in net neutrality rules that act against net neutrality by giving preferred websites the option to pay telecommunication companies for a guaranteed fast lane, in effect slowing down websites that don't pay for that fast lane. [28]
2015 July Finance Netflix announces that its stock has surged to an all-time high (to almost $100/share), a growth of 574% over the past five years. [29]
2016 January 6 International At the Consumer Electronics Show, Netflix announces a major international expansion into 130 new territories; with this expansion, the company promoted that its service would now be available nearly "worldwide", with the only notable exclusions including China, and regions subject to U.S. sanctions, such as Crimea (Ukraine), Syria, and North Korea.
2016 February 11 Product Netflix finishes its massive migration of its data servers to Amazon Web Services. [30]
2016 March Legal Netflix, supposedly a defender of net neutrality, admits that it sends lower quality video to mobile subscribers on AT&T and Verizon’s networks for the past 5 years. [31] This may hand the telecommunication giants a potent weapon in their legal fight against Net Neutrality. Some accuse Netflix of hypocrisy.

References

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