Interesting milestone. It took
"Netflix nearly 7 1/2 years to mail out 1 billion DVDs - about seven months less than it took McDonald's Corp. to sell 1 billion hamburgers after opening its first restaurant in April 1955."
Netflix has announced plans to go online, and should be offering a very interesting value proposition in the online video rental / download / selling experience. They have tons of :
* CRM data about market demand: what customers consume, how often, correlations, etc.
* experience negotiating with the movie studios
* experience on customer acquisition with a massive advertisement pression on the market (both online and offline), a skill often lacking elsewhere.
I believe Netflix has better chances to address this market of video portals than other players. Nevertheless they will have to learn about online DELIVERY, but they've shown that they know how to integrate complex technology on their service.
We should keep this number of 1 billion DVDs in mind when we reread Steve Jobs' keynote this year:
"I'm very pleased to report that we have sold 50 million TV shows. Let's go on to movies... when we decided to sell movies, Disney was our pioneering partner. In the first four months of selling movies we have sold 1.3 million movies on iTunes."
