Netflix the New Media Titan
      Its the recent phenomenon that captured America by storm, it is what 95% of college students are doing right now, and it is why children under the age of 4 are going to ask “what television was for” when they grow up, it is Netflix. 

         This new fad is a company that provides subscribers a platform for on demand Internet streaming for movies and television shows. It also has the much less used DVD mail rental service, all for less than ten dollars a month. Forbes listed it as 30^th in its most innovative companies list. According to Wikipedia the company was established in 1999 and approximately ten years later it had ten million subscribers and offered over one hundred thousand titles. Then by 2013 is more than tripled its amount of subscribers.

      

      Netflix didn’t stop there; I suppose the company got tiered of just being the medium to films and television programming. That is why in March of 2011 Netflix began producing its own original content to be premiered strictly off of Netflix. Netflix now streams a plethora of “Netflix originals” as well as rebooting and continuing other series, which it bought the rights to such as:

• ·      House of Cards
• ·      Arrested Development
• ·      Hemlock grove
• ·      Orange is the New Black
• ·      Lilyhammer
• ·      Knights of Sidonia
• ·      Love
• ·      Derek

      Netflix is also planning to team up with larger studios such as DreamWorks Animation and Disney to release new series based off of existing shows or franchises. Netflix was nominated for and won a Golden Globe award for its original series “House of Cards” and just this year its original document “The Square” was nominated for an academy award. 

Netflix Original Content

     Netflix is a provider of on demand video streaming over the internet and a by mail DVD distribution service. The company was established in 1997 with its headquarters in Los Gatos, California. Just ten years later Netflix announced that it had delivered its billionth DVD. And then in 2011 Netflix had 23.6 million subscribers in the United States and 26 million worldwide. According to a 2013 report by Sandvine, Netflix is the biggest source of North American downstream web traffic, at 32.3%, and registered 28.8% of aggregate traffic.
     Netflix's online streaming is so popular that it has started to create it's own content for it's site. In March 2011 Netflix released its plan to start airing it's original content beginning with the political drama House of Cards which debuted February 2013. Since then Netflix has picked up two seasons of Lillyhammer a season of Arrested Development (with talks of doing another), and two more original shows Hemlock Grove and Orange is the New Black. All three of Netflix's original shows have been approved for more seasons.
     The state of television certainly is taking an interesting turn with full series being created or revived solely for viewing on the internet. This system seems to be going well, but everything could change for the better or worse once Amazon makes its play at the online TV and Movie streaming business.