NetFlix.Com Overview

In 1997, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur by the name of Reed Hastings turned in a video late - very late. He paid $40 in overdue fines for Apollo 13. But the movie rental late fee inspired Hastings with a new idea. To solve the problem of movie rental late fees forever, he decided to marry two relatively new technologies: the internet and the DVD. The DVD was still so new in 1997 that there were only about 2,000 titles available, so trying to rent DVDs was a risky proposition. The owner of a DVD player might go to Blockbuster only to find they want to rent a movie that's not available.

Netflix started around two key ideas. First, you can rent movies online, so owners of DVD players would not have to face the disappointment of going to the store to rent a movie, only to find the movie they wanted was already checked out. With over 997 DVD titles even in its early days, online movie rentals through Netflix was already a better option than the local video store. The second key idea was that your online movie rental arrives in the mail, and you can mail it back whenever you want to - no late fees.

As DVDs and the internet grew more popular, so did Netflix. Today, Netflix is still making it easy to rent movies online, but you can also rent movies and TV shows and stream them directly to your computer or television. Ever the innovator, Netflix is quickly taking the online movie rental industry to the next level.

To join Netflix, all you need to do is subscribe. With a basic subscription, you can rent one movie at a time. When you mail that movie back, you can rent another one. Depending upon your subscription level, you have up to eight movie rentals out at one time. Watch out - you still have to pay extra when you rent a movie in Blu-ray. Blu-ray owners are probably better off with Blockbuster Online until Netflix catches back up.

Other than the extra fee to rent movies in Blu-ray, the price structure for online movie rentals are virtually the same for both Blockbuster and Netflix. Rent a movie at a time for $8.99 per month; rent two movies at a time for $13.99 per month; rent three movies at a time for $16.99 per month.