20 Things You Didn't Know About Netflix
10. We Have YouTube To Thank For Netflix's Current Form
Back in its earlier days, Netflix wasn't always set on a future as a streaming service. In fact, in the mid-2000s, there was a point where the company was ready to center its business around downloads instead, but after seeing the dominance of YouTube, they pivoted and became the major streaming provider we see today.
The story goes like this. When the internet started to become a household staple around 2005, Netflix was gearing up to launch the "Netflix box", a service that people could use to download entire movies (for a fee, of course) to watch the next day.
The reason why they chose downloads was because this allowed them to give users the best possible picture and sound quality, as opposed to streaming, which was prone to issues like latency and frame-rate drops.
But everything changed when the folks in charge saw how popular YouTube had started to become. It showed them that consumers "were willing to trade fidelity for convenience and speed", which led to them scrapping the downloads idea and focusing on streaming instead.
Clearly, that was a solid call.