
#Vox youtube strategy download
We had to transform our “Netflix box” from a hard drive that would download video to one that would stream it.* But finally, in 2007, we launched Netflix streaming because we saw the potential that YouTube presented.Įvery month, YouTube seemed to be growing faster, launching in new markets, increasing its number of views and attracting more and more people to share videos. That pivot took two long years, during which we had to renegotiate all our rights and build an entirely new architecture to host and serve content.

And it caused us to stop our launch and pivot to a service that would allow consumers to stream movies remotely instead of downloading them. Witnessing the popularity of YouTube was a revelation. We at Netflix - along with everyone else in the industry at the time - were focused on delivering movies to people in the highest quality available.īut YouTube clearly demonstrated that people were willing to trade fidelity for convenience and speed. More precisely, I saw grainy videos of snowboarding accidents and people lighting their kitchens on fire, and I saw that those videos were attracting massive viewership numbers, making YouTube one of the fastest-growing sites on the internet. It was incredibly difficult to acquire the download rights to movies, just as it was difficult to create the new box and service, but by 2005, we were finally ready to launch. The initial thinking was that we would create and supply customers with a “Netflix box” that they could use to download movies overnight to watch the next day.
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It wasn’t the first time that Netflix had evaluated an internet-only option, but only in the mid-2000s did data speeds and bandwidth costs finally reach the point where asking users to download an entire movie online no longer seemed like a crazy idea. But I was hungry for a challenge, so I offered to take on the new project.

You can work on something for years only to find that project mothballed during a quick meeting. The company’s culture prides itself on relentless focus, dispassionately eliminating business initiatives that are not core to the overall strategy. Now, volunteering to lead a new initiative is a very stupid thing to do at Netflix.
