Ranked as one of the top 5 companies around the world, it is the company that people want to work for. Its CEO is the world’s one of the richest people. This big business started at a little online DVD rental service shop. About 20 years later, after the business started, this small video online rental store became the biggest online movie series streaming platform. This amazing streaming company was founded by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, and the name of the company is Netflix.

The idea for Netflix started in a car during the conversation between Randolph and Hastings. During the conversation, they had a conversation about starting a new business. At first, the idea was renting videos. Since they were not sure about the success of a video rental service as it was immediately after the invention of the DVD player, they started the business with doubt.

After they decided to start a business, they considered the name of the business. The first name was Kibble, which means the food of a dog or cat. The name Kibble was actually just a random name, which is not real. They had a few choices for a real name, which were Luna.com, Replay.com, Webflix.com, Rent.com, and Cinema Center because it was a DVD rental service. But the final name was chosen as Netflix, which is a combination of “Net”—referring to the Internet—and “Flix”—meaning movies or videos.

In April of 1998, with the company name Netflix, Randolph and Hastings started an internet DVD rental service with 926 different kinds of DVDs. For the first day of the business, 137 people ordered, which is huge success for a starting business. After a year of the business, customers quickly increased and the number of available DVDs increased. At the end of the year, they had about 3,100 DVDs in their storage. However, there was a problem. The customers were the people who wanted to buy the DVDs from Netflix, not using the renting service. Because the majority of people favored using Netflix for buying DVDs, they tried a lot of things like cooperating with the company that makes the DVD players and giving the customer who buys the player a free rent coupon.

At first, Netflix rented DVDs for a week, but because they had not so many customers, they changed their rent system, which is where the monthly payment system emerged. So the new method worked like this. First they got the monthly payment. For the customers who paid for the monthly payment, they send 2 to 3 DVDs which the customer wanted to watch. In this service, they had no returning rules. Customers watched and returned the DVDs whenever they wanted to and, a few days after returning, got new ones. This new system of Netflix, brought a big success. But because of the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, they had no more people or investors who could provide money for their business. Even though they had a lot of people who were subscribed to their business, the different transaction time of customers made the biggest problems for Netflix.

Because of this problem, they had a deal with Blockbuster. Netflix offered a deal to Blockbuster for about $500 million dollars. But the CEO of Blockbuster declined the deal with Netflix because of the huge dot-com bubble. After 10 years, Blockbuster closed their business, but Netflix had big success.

Because they saw an improvement in internet service, they decided to change their business to an online DVD streaming service. But again, they had a problem. The series got uploaded on their streaming platform, remained for a really short time, due to the contract. So, to prevent the problem, they started the Netflix Original Series to upload series forever on their platform.

The success of Netflix wasn’t just easy work. From the first Netflix Original Series “The House of Cards,” the two founders’ hard work made Netflix the number one streaming service of the world.

Listen to the article as read by the author: