15 years and one day ago, Netflix was a video and DVD rental company. But it wasn’t like video stores, their business model was much more interesting, because for a flat monthly fee, they would send movies (including new releases, of course) from their catalog that you requested to your home (in the United States, of course). And of course they also took care of its collection. It was like a home video rental offered over the Internet, and with this business model it faced the video rental stores of its life, from the smallest ones to the then gigantic Blockbuster chain.

You read that right, yes, I said 15 years and one day ago, because that was their only business model from 1998 until that day. However on January 16, 2008 everything changed, or more precisely, everything started to change for the company from was the date chosen for the debut of her streaming platform, as The New York Times reported at the time. A service that at the time was on physical support in addition to renting movies and was offered free of charge to its subscribers.

The predictions of some analysts, as we can read in this article, were quite negative, to the extent that they predicted great economic losses for the company and its investors, as Netflix diverted from its main and profitable business, VHS rental. and DVDs. It doesn’t cost me much to imagine the same analysts betting on a bright future for Blockbuster and the like, it’s more than interesting to see how things change when analyzed with perspective.

In its first version, the Netflix streaming service was integrated into the web interface for the management of the tape and disc request service, and already at that time the company’s managers considered it from the point of view of “instant gratification”, a concept closely related to the sale of a digital asset over the Internet and which, thanks to Netflix, Spotify and other services made the leap from sales to subscriptions. Netflix executives knew how to predict the future, even as some analysts advised ordinary investors to sell their shares in the company. And an interesting detail about it: a few months after this recommendation and with the already operational streaming service, the shares practically doubled their value.

But events, investors, and more aside, what’s really important is that Netflix has brought video-on-demand over the Internet in the same way that Spotify brings music. Although subscription is a model that also has its detractors, they have reinvented the audiovisual consumption market and give us what we want, when we want it, wherever we are, and that deserves our credit.