Abstract
Reed Hastings found himself in the middle of a customer and social media firestorm in the fall of 2011 when Netflix announced a plan to reinvent itself as a streaming media access provider—to the disadvantage of its DVD rental customers. Netflix intended to spin out its original DVDs-by-mail subscription business into a separate company called Qwikster while the Netflix brand would offer only streaming video options. The company’s most popular $9.99 per month subscription plan for combined streaming plus DVDs-by-mail would be eliminated. Customers would have to choose between subscribing to DVD titles through Qwikster and accessing streaming media titles from Netflix—or be forced to pay monthly fees to each company to maintain both types of access. It seemed that Hastings had decided to test the boundaries of his theory that companies “rarely die from moving too fast” by pushing Netflix customers to immediately adopt his vision for the future of streaming media.
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Cronin, M.J. (2014). Netflix Switches Channels. In: Top Down Innovation. SpringerBriefs in Business. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03901-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03901-5_3
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