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Netflix, The World's Largest Online DVD Rental Service
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| By Frederic Neema/ Gamma | |||||
| Netflix is the world's largest online DVD movie rental service, offering more than 4 million members access to more than 60,000 titles, spanning more than 200 genres. Netflix, one of the most successful dot-com ventures, was founded by Reed Hastings. He launched a subscription movie rental service in 1999 with the goal of using the DVD format and the Internet to make it easier for people to find and rent movies. Today, Netflix operates 39 shipping centers throughout the United States with over than 1,200 employees. Netflix’s subscribers have the choice of nine subscription plans, starting at $9.99 per month for unlimited rentals with one DVD out at a time. There are no due dates, no late fees and no shipping fees. Netflix has more than 42 million DVDs while a typical neighborhood video store generally has less than 3,000 titles, with multiple copies available only for a fraction of these titles. On any given day, more than 35,000 of the 60,000 titles available at Netflix are in distribution. Netflix members select approximately 60 percent of their movies based on movie recommendations tailored to their individual tastes. According to Netflix, if instead of receiving movies by mail, members drove two miles each way to a rental store, they would consume 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day and release 8,800 tons of carbon dioxide emissions daily or more than 2.2 million tons annually. They also claim that they ship about 17,000 tons of DVDs each year. If placed side by side, the discs would form a line about 30,000 miles long. If every DVD they ship was stacked in a single pile, the stack would grow by 4,500 feet each day and would be taller than Mt. Everest within a week. Netflix comes from “Net” for the Internet and “flix” for flicks, a term to designate films or movies so-called due to the flicker (screen) of the image. Frederic Neema Netflix’s website is at www.netflix.com. |
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