20+ Things You Don’t Know About Netflix

Netflix is no doubt the best of video streaming services, thanks to its large and popular list of original movies and television shows. That’s not all, Netflix — apart from its features like offline mode — has a lot more interesting facts and statistics under its sleeve. And that’s exactly what we’re going to discuss below.

The history behind Netflix

#1

Do you know the inspiration behind the company? A movie — Apollo 13 — was rented by Reed Hastings, and he had to pay forty dollars for late fees. When he questioned the renting business model, he founded Netflix.

Source: Apollo 13 Movie

#2

Netflix is a year older than Google. It’s unbelievable, right? It was founded by Reed Hastings (its CEO) and Marc Randolph on August 29, 1997.

#3

Reed Hastings almost sold 49% stake of Netflix to Blockbuster — a rental giant worth $4.8B — in 2000. However, Blockbuster declined the buyout. And guess what happened later? It filed for bankruptcy in 2010. If only it had bought Netflix in 2000, the story would have been different now.

#4

Netflix reported its first profit in 2003 after seven years of existence as a company. It had a profit of $6.5 million with $272 million in revenues.

#5

Netflix was not a streaming service at first. It was an online movie rental store in the US that offered a subscription-based DVD-via-mail service. It launched its streaming service in 2007 — a year before the recession.

#6

In an online survey conducted by Netflix in 2013, 61% of people said to binge-watch regularly. They shared that they regularly watch at least 2-3 episodes of a television series in a single sitting. Do you binge-watch?

#7

Netflix launched in 60 countries after launching its streaming service in 2007. It expanded to 130 countries in 2016, thus it’s now available in 190+ countries. Its current subscriber base fills most of the map (shown below) with exceptions including China, Crimea, North Korea, and Syria.

Its culture and workplace

#8

Reed Hastings, its CEO, has avoided an office since 2008; he works using just a smartphone and meets with people around the office building.

#9

Netflix employees can take as many days off as they want as long as their work doesn’t suffer. Does that inspire you to find a job at Netflix?

#10

There is another reason to get a job in Netflix: become a tagger. You get paid for watching content from home, collecting data, categorizing and tagging them. And finally, submit them to improve the recommendations.

#11

Its executives in California made house calls during the company’s initial years to ask questions and find out people’s experience with its site. Netflix, as a token of appreciation for their help, bought coffee for them.

Its growth over the world

#12

Netflix usage surpassed that of cable and satellite TV for the first time in 2018 since 58% of the subscribers prefer it as it is cost-effective.

#13

Netflix owns 26.58 percent of global market share across video streaming services and remains the biggest contributor to the download traffic across the world, costing over 15 percent of the global internet traffic.

#14

Netflix subscribers accessed the services from 450 million unique devices as of December 2018. It’s 15% of the 3.3B smartphones in the world.

#15

Netflix is the first streaming service to join the Motion Picture Association of America, which includes big names such as Walt Disney, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Bros as well.

#16

Netflix subscribers streamed record-breaking 350 million hours of movies and television shows on January 7, 2019. On average, its subscribers stream 140 million hours of video content every day around the globe.

#17

Netflix is conquering the globe! It has more than 148 million subscribers and expects to achieve 335+ million subscribers by 2028. Its competitors HBO claims to have 142M and Amazon Prime have 100M subscribers.

Original movies & shows

#18

Netflix launched three original series for the first time in 2013 — House of Cards, Hemlock Grove, and Orange is the New Black. It pulled off 31 Primetime Emmy nominations for these original shows.

#19

The Office (U.S.) was the most viewed show (7.19%) in 2018, which is not owned by Netflix. In the meantime, 13 Reasons Why was the most watched show (0.58%), which comes under the banner of Netflix Originals.

#20

Netflix Originals movies and shows received 112 Emmy nominations in 2018, which shot up from 90 nominations that Netflix received in 2017. It beat HBO’s 17-year long run in Emmy nominations. Surprising, right?

#21

According to Flixable, a third-party search engine for Netflix, Netflix was lacking movie selection in 2018. Netflix had 530 shows and 6,755 movies in 2010, but it offered just 3,839 movies in 2018, of which, 596 were Certified Fresh (15.5%). In the meantime, it had 1,569 TV shows — tripled!

Some more milestones

#22

Did you know? Netflix was momentarily bigger than Disney with its market capitalization being more than $153 billion on March 24, 2018.

#23

Netflix is one of the world’s largest internet company by revenue. Its annual revenue amounted to $15.8 billion with $1.21 B as profits in 2018.

#24

Netflix reported $4.8 billion debt in 2018. It had spent $6.9 billion for its original content (movies and TV shows) till the third quarter of 2018.