20 Things You Didn't Know About Netflix

Walk into someone's home in 2020 (only if they invite you - no breaking and entering, please), and you're almost guaranteed to find three things in their entertainment setup: a TV, a DVD or Blu-Ray player, and a Netflix subscription.

Over 150 million people around the world pay for the streaming service every single month, a figure that, for comparison, means that Netflix is more popular than dominant home consoles like the Nintendo Wii and the PS4, and in addition, gives the platform around 40 million more paid users than Spotify has.

So yeah. It's massive.

With streaming taking off over the last several years thanks to its ease-of-use and affordability, Netflix has become a household staple for quite a lot of people, and despite the fact that it's still a relatively new thing, it has a long and complex history with many interesting details that few people are aware of.

And so, we thought we'd take a look at some of them. From an origin story that could've gone very differently to some information about how the service actually runs, why not fill the silence of the between-episode gap with some neat facts and figures about the current streaming kingpin?

It's not something we tend to think about, but with thousands and thousands of different movies and TV shows, the total combined size of the content on Netflix is clearly very large, and while we don't have a figure that tells us exactly how large, there are plenty of educated guesses floating around online. And all of them are nuts.

During an article analysing how the process of streaming content to your device actually works, TechHive mentioned that Netflix's library accounts for "over a petabyte" of memory. For context, a single petabyte equals 1,000 terabytes, while a single terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes.

It's an amount of data that is almost too gargantuan to comprehend - high-end smartphones normally max out at around 512GB, which isn't even one terabyte.