MY curiosity was piqued when I was looking at an Internet report that said the biggest user of Internet bandwidth in the USA was a company called Netflix. What? I would have thought it was Yahoo, or Google (with YouTube), or Facebook. But Netflix? It was not only the biggest user, but estimates say that up to a third of total Internet traffic in the United States during prime time (that is around 7 p.m.) when everybody is watching TV, is from Netflix. Why? What does it do?
Netflix is an American company that was established in 1997. At first, it was like Blockbuster, which rented out DVDs and movies. But they became popular because they offered unlimited DVDs. For a monthly fee, you could get as many DVDs as you could watch. The idea was to create your own list of the DVDs you wanted to rent. Then if they had it, they would mail it to you with a mailback envelope. Once you finished watching it, you mailed it back and when they received it, they would mail you the titles that they had available, which you reserved. Consumers liked this, and by its 10th year, in 2007, Netflix announced that they delivered their one billionth DVD. In 2011, Netflix had over 23 million subscribers in US alone.
One of the things they did was that they were also successful in transforming their business. They became a provider of video streaming – you pay a monthly fee, and you can watch all the titles they have through Internet on-demand.
This includes many of the most popular movie and TV titles that they were able to get. Some estimates say they easily have tens of thousands of titles in their database, but this was something I could not verify because for a long time, Netflix was only available in the US and in selected countries, and could not be accessed in the Philippines.
Now comes the announcement that they have expanded into 130 countries, and that includes the Philippines! Finally! Not only that, they announced that they will give one month free trial, and their options include options from P370 per month to P550 per month. That is pretty affordable. I still don’t have the details, but you may check it out in the various news services and their web sites for details.
Indeed, the way we watch TV will not be the same. We don’t have to exactly have to change our time, and watch it only on one time slot. I think the world is moving that all of us can pretty much watch anything and at the time that we want. Ain’t that great?
(wilson@ngkhai.com)