Netflix is turning a very important page in its history. It is truly the end of an era for the company which does not stop and continues to evolve over the years.
Netflix has been a part of our daily lives for years now. The SVOD platform has established itself as a reference in the field, and many other players subsequently joined the race, such as Disney with Disney+ or Amazon with Prime Video. It’s now up to whoever has the best programs, the best films and exclusive series and the biggest catalog. For the moment, it is Netflix which is in the lead, followed very closely by its comrades, that said. However, the platform at the red N has come a long way, very, very far away.
Netflix turns an important page in its history
Before becoming one of the leaders in SVOD, Netflix was a DVD rental company. The particularity of the latter was to offer postal shipments, where most rental companies only offered rental of cassettes and DVDs in stores, like Blockbuster, a very well-known chain on the other side. of the Atlantic. Netflix struggled a bit when it launched in 1999, but the company would eventually break through and find a place of choice in homes. In 2007, Netflix launched the rental of films and series on PC, a first step in the world of video on demand or VOD. Success is there. In the years that followed, Netflix expanded to all continents and almost all countries.
Partnerships are signed with competitors to allow smaller services to take advantage of Netflix support to broadcast content in certain countries. The recipe works and the business is doing wonderfully. As it expands, the Netflix service mutates to become the essential platform we know today. In 2020, Netflix even made a very significant shift and decided to gradually cut its other services. In 2022, the company marked the definitive death of its DVD rental service. On September 23, 2023, the last films found buyers and stocks began to empty. A few days ago, Netflix finally released its final DVD, a copy of True Grita western from the Coen brothers.
It’s the end of an era, but there’s no turning back
It’s the end of an era for Netflix, which has just turned an important page in its history, but the company didn’t have much choice. Rental of films and series in DVD and Blu-ray format hardly made any money anymore. In 2022, it only brought in $147 million, while the SVOD service brought in almost $8 billion in the first quarter of 2023 alone. Suffice to say that the calculations are quickly done. Netflix is a phenomenon that has forever marked our daily lives, but also the entire industry. Old veterans of the cinema still spit in the face of these services, but they are evolving and becoming more and more important and influential.
For example, Netflix programs have already won Oscars. A large number of renowned directors are taking advantage of the flexibility of the platform to propose essays or projects that they would never have been able to bring to fruition in traditional cinema or television. A large number of directors have also earned their first stripes on the SVOD service. Without forgetting all the programs, films and series from foreign countries which until now went unnoticed. It’s hard to imagine that series like The House of Paper or Squid Game could have had such success on traditional media. It’s a completely different era which also has its setbacks, such as the almost constant increase in subscriptions, which have taken several euros since the creation of the service, a service which is growing, certainly, but all the same. Without forgetting this witch hunt which earned Netflix a storm of criticism, the famous restriction on account sharing. No matter, Netflix has never been doing better, and a long life awaits it. New releases are legion, subscribers have never been so numerous, and new films and series are multiplying at breakneck speed.