Netflix Inc was founded in 1997 as company offering DVD rentals by mail. The company went public in 2002 and is traded as NFLX at Nasdaq. Nowadays, Netflix has shifted their focus onto offering streamed movies and TV-series online, but the option of renting DVDs (and blue-ray discs) by mail is still available within the United States. Netflix online streaming is available in many different parts of the world, including North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and parts of Europe.

A majority of the content offered by Netflix is licensed from third-party content creators such as movie studios, but since 2013 Netflix has also been offering original programming. Notable examples of Netflix original programming include Narcos, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Hemlock Grove, Jessica Jones, Starwars: The Clonewars, and Borgia.

Purchasing shares directly from the company?

There is no direct stock purchase plan for Netflix shares.

Dividends planned?

At the time of writing, Netflix has not released any information about any planned dividends payments.

Here are historical cash dividends payed by Netflix (up to and including 2015)

Declared	Record	Payable	Amount	Type
Jun 23, 2015	July 2, 2015	July 14, 2015	6.0000	Stock dividend on increased shares

Also note the 2 for 1 stock split that took place on February 12, 2004.

What is this company selling?

Netflix offers movies and TV series with unlimited viewing via Internet. The user pays a monthly membership fee. Users do not have to sign up for certain number of months and the subscription can be canceled online. Movies and TV series are available on-demand, 24/7. Users can select, start, pause, and resume watching at their own discretion.

• Netflix does not generate income from commercial breaks or similar in their programming.
• Netflix does not offer pay-per-view. The viewing in unlimited for those who have paid the monthly fee.
• Netflix focuses chiefly on movies (fiction and non-fiction) and TV-series. They do not offer sports, music videos, pornography, game shows, reality shows, or user-generated content.

Users do not have to use any particular “Netflix console” to watch movies and TV-series. A long row of devices connected to the Internet will work, e.g. computer, tablet, mobile phone, Playstation, Xbox, DVD-player, Blu-ray player, HDTV, set-top box, etc.

Netflix physical disc rental

In addition to its online streaming, Netflixi is still offering DVD and Blu-ray disc rental by mail within the United States. Users pay a monthly membership fee.

Background & Future

• Netflix was founded by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings in California in 1997. Netflix, Inc. incorporated on August 29, 1997. The main business idea had come to Hastings when he was paying 40 USD in overdue fines for a rented copy of Apollo 13.
• The Netflix site was launched in 1998, with 925 works available for rent for 0.50 USD per rental (plus postage).
• Netflix launched their monthly subscription-based service in September 1999. In early 2000, they discontinued their single-rental model.
• Netflix IPO:ed on May 29, 2002. The share price was 15 USD for common stock.
• By 2005, Netflix were shipping out approximately 1 million DVD:s every day and had 35,000 film titles available.
• Netflix delivered its billionth DVD on February 25, 2007. Around the same time, Netflix started to move away from mailing DVD:s and shifted focus to offering video on demand over the Internet. Initially, online streaming was only available for customers in the United States. It would take until 2010 before Netflix started offering online streaming in other countries.
• By 2009, Netflix surpassed 10 million subscribers.
• By 2010, Netflix was the biggest source of evening Internet traffic in North America. In November that year, they launched a standalone streaming service online that didn’t require a DVD rental account. This was also the year when Netflix entered into a five-year agreement to stream films from Lions Gate Entertainment, Paramount Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
• Netflix first original series debuted in 2013.
• In September 2013, Netflix had over 40 million subscribers, of which roughly 31 million were located in the United States.
• In September 2014, Netflix had subscribers in over 40 different countries.
• In October 2014, DRM plug-ins were made available to make it possible to play Netflix’ HTML5 videos in Chrome on computers running Ubuntu 12.04 or 14.04. Until then, Netflix did not officially support playback on Linux devices (except for Roku).
• On July 14, 2015 (at the close of trading) Netflix did a 7-for-1 stock split by giving all shareholders an additional six shares for each share they held. This effectively dropped the stock price to 100 USD.
• In October 2015, Netflix had just below 70 million subscribers, of which roughly 43 million were located in the United States.
• Netflix becomes a popular stock to trade among binary options traders.  The rise and volatility of the share made it perfect for this type of market speculation.  Most binary options brokers who offer stock based binary options started to offer Netflix based options.
• For the US market, Netflix has decided to grow content spending and marketing spending slightly slower than the revenue growth. The goal is to increase contribution margin to 40 percent by 2020.
• The non-US markets that Netflix entered a while back (Canada, Latin America, the UK, Ireland, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands) is now contribution-positive.
• At the 2015 World Maker Faire New York, Netflix unveiled a prototype for a device they called The Switch. The Switch can be used to order takeout, silence phones and turn off the lights – just what you need for a Netflix marathon. The device has not been patented by Netflix and Netflix released instructions on their website on how to make one yourself as a DIY project.
• Netflix’s global margin strategy is to expand quickly while staying slightly profitable through 2016. For 2017 and onwards, they expect to generate global material profits.
• Netflix plans to spend over 700 USD on technology and development in 2016.
• Netflix intends to be available in nearly all countries by 2017. (One of the countries that Netflix does not intend to reach by 2017 is China.) No expansion into additional countries is planned for 2017.

Practical info

Company type	Public company
Industry	Entertainment
Traded as	NASDAQ: NFLX
Founded	1997
Headquartered	Los Gatos, California, USA
Website	Netflix.com

Contact information

Netflix Inc

100 Winchester Circle
Los Gatos, CA 95032
Phone #: +1-408-5403700
Fax #: +1-302-6555049

Transfer agent

Computershare Limited
P.O. Box 43023
Providence, RI 02940-3023
USA

Street address: 250 Royall Street, Canton, MA 02021, USA

Phone #: +1-781-5752879