Netflix is one of the most popular American media-services provider and a production company. Netflix is mostly known for its subscription-based streaming service where you can watch many movies and TV shows. In the past few years, Netflix has also become famous for the movies that they’ve produced.
If you want to know more about Netflix, where it was founded and when, and what’s the net worth of this company, keep reading this article.
When Was Netflix Founded?
Netflix was founded on August 29, 1997, in California, by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings. The first idea was to sell VHS tapes, but they were too expensive and too delicate to ship, so they’ve rejected the idea. After that, they’ve come up with DVDs, because they were introduced to the public in the US on March 31, 1997. They then tested the concept of selling and renting DVDs by mail, by mailing a compact disc to Hastings’ house in Santa Cruz. They were thrilled when the disc arrived at the address in perfect condition.
Netflix was first launched on April 14, 1998, and they were the world’s first online DVD rental store. They’ve had 925 titles available and only 30 employees. In September 1999, they’ve introduced the monthly subscription concept. Their concept included no due dates, late fees, shipping and handling fees, or per-title rental fees. Netflix had 300,000 subscribers from the US, and they started to lose money. But in just a couple of years, in 2002, Netflix got an increase in subscribers.
Netflix went public on May 29, 2002, and they’ve sold 5.5 million shares of common stock at the price of only $15. Not even a month later they’ve sold additional 825,000 shares at the same price. In 2005, Netflix had 35,000 different movies to rent, and they would ship out 1 million DVDs every.
The New Netflix
The first time that the video-on-demand streaming service started was in 2007. That year they’ve decided to go with a streaming concept and not the previous project of a “Netflix box”, a box that would download movies overnight and they would be ready to watch the next day. When they started with the streaming service they only had 1000 titles, but by June 2009 they’ve had more than 12,000 movies and shows.
In January 2013, Netflix had 27.1 million US streaming customers and 29.4 million total streaming customers. By September 2014, Netflix had subscribers from over 40 countries, and in October 2018 their customer base reached 137 million worldwide. Netflix became the world’s biggest and most famous online subscription video service.
And what about their DVD business? In 2012 Netflix confirmed that they’ve acquired the domain name DVD.com. It took them a couple of years, but by 2016, they’ve quietly rebranded their DVD service, and now it is called DVD.com, A Netflix Company.
It may come to you as a surprise, but their DVD service still has around 3 million subscribers. And in the year 2018, DVD rentals gave $60.2 million profit from $120.4 million in revenue.
Netflix Net Worth
Netflix currently has over 150 million paid subscribers all around the globe. But this year they’ve had a bad second-quarter. Their shares were down nearly 20%, and they’ve had a loss of $26 billion in market value. Despite that, Netflix claims that this is a positive year for them and that the results were going to be better. Netflix has today an estimated net worth of astonishing $125 billion.
