Digital Disciplines: Attaining Market Leadership via the Cloud, Big Data, Social, Mobile, and the Internet of Things

Chapter 13Netflix—Entertaining Disruption

Netflix is a global company with over 60 million subscribers as of March, 2015. It is primarily in the business of distributing feature-length motion pictures, documentaries, television series, animations, and the like. Netflix originally rented physical DVDs that were ordered online but delivered by mail, then added Blu-ray discs, and then offered video streaming over the Internet. In addition to distribution, it creates content as well, and has been nominated for and won major industry awards for some of its popular series such as House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black.

Netflix has had a major impact in the markets in which it operates, to put it mildly. In North America, Netflix dominates downstream Internet traffic during prime time; it's now responsible for over a third of that traffic. In Australia, even prior to official availability Netflix accounted for 4 percent of bandwidth utilization.¹

At the turn of the millennium, VHS and DVD rentals required a trip to the local video store to return existing rentals, look for the titles you wanted, ask if they were perhaps in a different section of the store under a different genre, realize they were out of stock, talk to a store clerk, ask if anyone had recently returned any of them, wait while the clerk flipped through the recent return pile, tell your kids to behave and stop playing with the candy for sale, select different titles, hand over your membership card and pay for the ...