Tag archive: Hastings

Back in 2006, movie rental powerhouse Netflix announced a competition: if someone—or a team of someones—could come up with a way to improve the service's movie recommendation system by 10 percent, they'd wein $1 million. As expected, the competition drew interest from a wide variety of programmers and statisticians—and, naturally, Netflix began to reap the benefits of recommendation improvements investigated by… Read More

Over a year ago, Netflix began offering an online download service that enables members to download movies for viewing on their PCs. Now, the company is taking online media delivery to the next level with the Netflix Player, a diminutive set-top box developed with Silicon Valley startup Roku, Inc. that can leverage Netflix users' broadband Internet connections to stream more than 10,000 movies and TV shows from Netflix's digital… Read More

Video-rental firm Netflix announced today that it plans to begin carrying titles in the HD DVD next-generation DVD format as soon as they become available in March, 2006. “For those subscribers who have an immediate interest in renting movies in high-def, we're committed to making the full range of titles available at Netflix the moment they're introduced,” said Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Toshiba is expected to have… Read More

Is it any surprise people prefer to have DVD rentals painlessly delivered to their doorstep rather than shovelling through the racks at Blockbuster? At a meeting with industry analysts yesterday, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said the company expects its annual revenue to increase dramatically and that the DVD rental firm may reach 20 million subscribers by 2010 to 2012. Going further, Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Kilgore estimated the DVD… Read More