10 Incredible Facts You Didn't Know About Netflix
2. You Used To Pay For Content By The Hour
Much like the advent of portable computers that both contain the collective knowledge of mankind AND fit in your pocket, we really take the unbelievable service that Netflix provides for granted. How often do you actually sit there while streaming Peaky Blinders and think about just how incredibly cheap you are getting so much content for? If Netflix were to announce tomorrow that they were changing their payment platform and rather than paying one flat fee you would pay for content by the hour, their headquarters would burn to the ground.
Yet that's exactly how Netflix used to run. When the online streaming service began (remember that Netflix was simply a DVD postal service for a number of years and still actually runs this part of their business today) you didn't just get everything for ten dollars a month. You paid ten dollars and got ten hours of streaming. Which is just enough to have a binge watch of the first season of Making a Murderer.
What's even stranger though, is that compared to how we used to rent movies even ten years ago, that is not a bad deal at all. Video stores could charge anything from $5.00 to $8.00 per night for one movie, depending on how new it was, and how generous your particular video store was. Not only that but you had to go and get the damn thing and return it or face paying extra in fines. Ten hours of content could have cost up to $80.00 which means that at a price of $1.00 per hour, it was still up to eight times less when Netflix was charging you by the hour.
Still - it will make anybody who wasted their time with 'The Ridiculous Six' feel like they lost any money. Just precious hours of life instead.