Co-founded by Reed Hastings in 1997, Netflix started life as a rental DVD service in the mold of Blockbuster. But, 20 years later, the company dramatically pivoted to being an online streaming service, fully embracing the internet era.
“Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use. In fact, technology has been the story of human progress from as long back as we know. In 100 years people will look back on now and say, “That was the Internet Age.””
Changing with the times
Five years after launching Netflix’s streaming platform, Hastings was speaking with Forbes on the business’ pivot and its role in the emerging internet landscape.
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This shift, according to reports, was decades in the making, with Hastings plotting it since Netflix’s inception, with the DVD rental business a means to grow the customer base.
His comments highlight the belief that our society is entering a new age defined by the internet and the shift of many businesses from bricks and mortar to an online ecosystem. The comments also frame the new “age” of humanity as transcending the reliance on a particular material – instead basing progress on the shift to the internet.
The new age
This notion is hardly original – plenty of figures in the tech industry have suggested we are graduating to a new age of humanity defined by an idea or material.
For example, physicist Michio Kaku identified several ages in the last few hundred years, including the Steam Age, Age of Electricity, and the Silicon Age that began in the late 20th century and lasted until just recently.
And now? With the constraints of Moore’s Law imposing physical limits on computation, he suggested a new age of humanity could belong to quantum – with the embryonic technology of quantum computing allowing us to transcend conventional power constraints. Others, meanwhile, attribute a new age of humanity to AI.
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