home box office or prestige television

Though the origin story that one of the co-founders conceived of the idea of a movie-by-mail service over his anger at being charged forty dollars in late fees by Blockbuster Video on a rental of Apollo 13 turned out to be apocryphal and when the concern first started losing money they offered to merge with the same brick-and-mortar network looking to them to supply logistics, Netflix—recently attaining a market valuation larger than the oil companies during the global lock-down and quarantines—was founded on this day in 1997, seeing a niche in the recently introduced media format, the DVD, bandwidth and streaming-speed limitation not yet providing the infrastructure for cinema on demand.
To realise the on-line delivery model that Netflix had hoped to provide from the beginning, they initially developed a dedicated “box” that would download movies overnight during off-hours so that they’d be available to watch the next day in 2005, but with recognising the compelling popularity of Youtube and the willingness to entertain relatively low-resolution content, the company abandoned their device and went for a lower quality streaming service deployed by 2007 and backed by an algorithm that eagerly suggested what to watch next, outpacing the previous recommendation routine Cinematch. The company transformed how people watch television and intake media and has spurred many competitors for our attention and time.