In 2000, near the company’s peak, Blockbuster collected nearly $800 million in late fees, accounting for 16 percent of its annual revenue

Ted Sarandos, the Netflix co-CEO

Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless.

But the studios overlooked that streaming was more convenient than cable, as Netflix beamed images directly onto viewers’ laptops—and, soon enough, televisions and smartphones—with no annual contracts, cancelable at any time. Above all, there were no ads

U ntil recently no Hollywood studio had ever released two movies with the same name at the same time. At most studios, such a strategy would be unthinkable. Audiences might accidentally buy tickets to the wrong film, and the PR fallout would be disastrous: snipes from trade-magazine writers; angry calls from investors questioning the studios’ busin... See more

these figures remain a sham. To get to 6.7 million, Netflix first tallies the film’s “viewing hours,” the total amount of time that users have spent streaming the movie. Here, Netflix makes no distinction between users who watch Sweet Girl all the way through, those who watch less than two minutes, and those who watch just a few seconds thanks to a... See more

Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings

if you drive through Culver City you will see billboards for Amazon movies everywhere. Why? Because the directors who come to the studio lot to take a meeting there to make a movie, they drive there and they’re like, ‘Oh they’re marketing my movie.’ But they’re not.”

Netflix would charge customers a fixed monthly fee to rent up to four movies at a time. (This was soon reduced to three.) Customers could keep the discs as long as they wanted—no more late fees—but could only rent new movies after they mailed back the old ones