Netflix

The term “Netflix” was first used in the New York Times in an article on Thursday September 24^th, 1998. The article described Netflix as “the first company to rent and sell DVD movie titles over the internet”. This was clearly before streaming a TV show or a movie was even considered a possibility.

“Netflix” couldn’t be found while searching the Chicago Tribune newspaper using ProQuest. I searched for “Netflix” in the Los Angeles times and came up with the same result. Both of those newspapers only had the records until 1990. Netflix is a relatively new invention so I figure if they happened to have a bigger, more recent database, I could’ve found some more articles.

Netflix was first used in a scholarly source in a Proquest article called “Online retailer bows ‘world’s first’ Interenet store offering DVD rentals”  on April 19^th, 1998. Netflix was used for the first time on Muse in a piece called “Netflix in an Academic Library” in the Winter of 2010. The word Netflix was first referenced in an article called “The Crawford Files: talking ‘Bout MyLibrary” in April of 2002.

Netflix is most known for being the first company to allow streaming of many varieties of TV shows and movies effortlessly from your computer. If you hear the term “Netflix” you almost instantly think of streaming shows. However, they are a rapidly changing company and I would not be surprised if in 10-15 years the term Netflix takes on a completely different meaning.