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- KEYWORDS
- NETFLIX;
- TV;
- TELEVISION;
- BUSINESS;
- MEDIA;
- STREAMING;
- ENTERTAINMENT
In the spring of 2000, Reed Hastings, the C.E.O. of Netflix, hired a private plane and flew from San Jose to Dallas for a summit meeting with Blockbuster, the video-rental giant that had seventy-seven hundred stores worldwide handling mostly VCR tapes. Three years earlier, Hastings, then a thirty-six-year-old Silicon Valley engineer, had co-founded Netflix around a pair of emerging technologies: DVDs, and a Web site from which to order them. Now, for twenty dollars a month, the site’s subscribers could rent an unlimited number of DVDs, one at a time, for as long as they wished; the disks arrived in the mail, in distinctive red envelopes. Eventually, Hastings was convinced, movies would be rented even more cheaply and conveniently by streaming them over the Internet, and popular films would always be in stock. But in 2000 Netflix had only about three hundred thousand subscribers and relied on the U.S. Postal Service to deliver its DVDs; the company was losing money. Hastings proposed an alliance.
“We offered to sell a forty-nine-per-cent stake and take the name Blockbuster.com,” Hastings told me recently. “We’d be their online service.” Hastings, now fifty-three, has a trimmed, graying goatee and a slow, soft voice. As he spoke, he was drinking Prosecco at an outdoor table at Nick’s on Main, a favorite Italian restaurant of his, in Los Gatos, an affluent community in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The sounds of Sinatra carried across the patio.
Blockbuster wasn’t interested. The dot-com bubble had burst, and some film and television executives, like those in publishing and music, did not yet see a threat from digital media. Hastings flew home and set to work promoting Netflix to the public as the friendly rental underdog. By the time Blockbuster got around to offering its own online subscription service, in 2004, it was too late. “If they had launched two years earlier, they would have killed us,” Hastings said. By 2005, Netflix had 4.2 million subscribers, and its membership was growing steadily. Hastings had rented a house outside Rome for a year with his wife, Patty Quillin, and two children and was commuting to his Silicon Valley office two weeks each month. Hollywood studios began offering the company more movies to rent; the licensing arrangements presented a new way to make money from their libraries and provided leverage against Blockbuster. . . .
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