Season 3, Episode 9: Netflix (Part 2)

Oh my god, David, look at that podcast room you are in. That foam padding. Welcome to season three, episode nine of Acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. Today we are back with the acquired version of Terminator 2.

The second part of our Netflix episode. You like that, David? It's just for you. Oh man. That's great. That's great. Love it. Listeners, now if you remember the last episode we did covered the DVD saga of Netflix and where we left our heroes in two thousand nine, shortly before the epic launch of Quickster. So today we're gonna dive in on the era of streaming and later original content. So David, I wanted to have a uh a fun fact to start us off on on Netflix. So as you remember, they were once a plucky startup mailing DVDs to customers and and a you know a remnant of the pre-dot com bubble starting in ninety-seven. Um and they were doing this, you know, even before most people had DVD players. They they were waiting for the DVD wave to crest. This company now accounts for fifteen percent of all internet traffic. I know.

It's in my show notes. Well, sorry to blow your your cover early, but you know, streaming movies and T V as a category actually now makes up fifty-eight percent of downstream internet traffic. And no single service accounts for more of that that bandwidth than uh than Netflix does. And at peak times it can even account for forty percent of the US's concurrent internet traffic. So you could imagine maybe uh like eight PM Eastern or something like that. Absolutely.

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