By Susan Price
What do you want to watch? If you’re among the 55 percent of Americans who subscribe to streaming services, answering that question means choosing from hundreds of shows, or, if you’re in the mood for a movie, from thousands more titles.
Home entertainment has come a long way from a handful of shows playing on a handful of channels. And from 1997, when Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph started Netflix to create a sort of Amazon (then, still a really big bookstore) where people could rent VHS tapes and DVDs, which arrived in their mailboxes in spiffy red envelopes. Those envelopes are now marketing icons, and Netflix a juggernaut with about 190 million subscribers in every country in the world except China, North Korea, and Syria.
Netflix does have powerful rivals: that former bookseller, Amazon, Hulu, and the soon-tolaunch Apple TV+ and Disney Plus. To keep its subscribers loyal, and to keep signing up new ones, the company is making a huge bet on original content. It streamed its first original show, House of Cards, in 2013, and last year, spent $8 billion making its own series and movies.
Streaming services have changed how and what we watch. Rising fast in this revolution are two CMC alums: Lauren Iungerich ’96, a writer, producer, and director, and Netflix executive Tendo Nagenda ’97. Meet the new Hollywood.