Casual Viewing | Will Tavlin

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

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

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

The difference between Blockbuster and Netflix was this: Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless.

Thierry Frémaux, head of the Cannes Film Festival and a vocal critic of streamers, understood this well when he presented the dilemma at a Cannes press conference in 2021. “What directors have been discovered by [streaming] platforms?” he asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Frémaux began calling on journalists to name an auteur whose career had... See more

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.”

Ted Sarandos, the Netflix co-CEO

Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings

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