The history of Netflix is a long struggle for greatness marked by multiple disasters, lucky breaks, personal betrayal, and broken hearts. It has more drama than most of the movies Netflix rents.
Netflix has come a long way since 1997, when two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, decided to start an online DVD store before most people owned a DVD player. Today, Netflix has twenty million subscribers and annual revenues above $3 billion. Yet long-term success - or even survivial - is still far from guaranteed.
Journalist Gina Keating recounts the absorbing, fast-paced drama of the company's turbulent rise to the top and its attempt to invent two new kinds of business. First it engaged in a grueling decade-long war against video behemoth Blockbuster, transforming movie rental forever. Then it jumped into an even bigger battle for streaming online video against Google, Hulu, Amazon, and the big cable companies.
The quest to become the world's portal for premium video on demand will determine nothing less than the future of entertainment and the Internet. Keating makes this tale as absorbing as it is important.
'The colorful narrative climaxes with Netflix and archrival Blockbuster throttling each other in an old-fashioned price war that Netflix wins by a hair. Keating hypes the allegedly world-shaking technological transformations in how we access digital content, but what's far more interesting and dramatic is her smart portrait of how an ever-changing capitalism stays very much the same.'Publishers Weekly
'The story of Netflix's early years is fascinating, as is the corporate intrigue as the company grew.'Slate