Netflix, hoping to keep viewers at home, reveals its 2022 film lineup.

 Netflix, in full Netflix, Inc., media-streaming and video-rental company founded in 1997 by American entrepreneurs Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. It is also involved in the creation of original programming. Corporate headquarters are in Los Gatos, California.

In 1999 Netflix began offering an online subscription service through the Internet. Subscribers chose movie and television titles from Netflix’s Web site; the shows were then mailed to customers in the form of DVDs, along with prepaid return envelopes, from one of more than 100 distribution centres. Although customers typically rented for a flat monthly fee as many movies per month as they wished, the number of DVDs in their possession at any one time was limited according to their subscription plans. Netflix had tens of thousands of movie titles in its catalog.

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In 2006 Netflix launched the $1 million Netflix Prize contest to see if anyone could improve by 10 percent its recommendation system, an algorithm for predicting an individual’s movie preferences based on previous rental data. Three years later the prize was awarded to BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, a team made up of seven mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers from the United States, Canada, Austria, and Israel.

In 2007 Netflix began offering subscribers the option to stream some of its movies and television shows directly to their homes through the Internet. For most subscription plans, the streaming service was unlimited. Netflix subsequently partnered with manufacturers of various consumer electronics products, including video game consoles and Blu-ray Disc players, in order to enable its videos to be streamed over an Internet connection to those devices. In 2010 Netflix introduced a streaming-only plan that offered unlimited streaming service but no DVDs. Netflix then expanded beyond the United States by offering the streaming-only plan in Canada in 2010, in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2011, and in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Scandinavia in 2012. By 2016 its streaming service was available in more than 190 countries and territories. Netflix had announced in September 2011 that it would split its streaming and mail-based services, with the latter to be called Qwikster, but abandoned the planned split a month later, citing an outcry from its subscribers. While its streaming services became the biggest revenue generator—with more than 200 million subscribers in 2021—the rental division remained profitable.

Beginning in 2013 with the episodic drama series House of Cards, the company offered video content produced specifically for its streaming service. Such content became a major focus of Netflix, and by the end of 2021 it had offered more than 2,400 original titles. Its notable series included Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Stranger Things, Narcos, The Crown, Bridgerton, and Squid Game. It also produced numerous movies—notably Roma (2018), which won three Academy Awards, including best foreign language film.

William L. Hosch

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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corporation, specific legal form of organization of persons and material resources, chartered by the state, for the purpose of conducting business.

As contrasted with the other two major forms of business ownership, the sole proprietorship and the partnership, the corporation is distinguished by a number of characteristics that make it a more-flexible instrument for large-scale economic activity, particularly for the purpose of raising large sums of capital for investment. Chief among these features are: (1) limited liability, meaning that capital suppliers are not subject to losses greater than the amount of their investment; (2) transferability of shares, whereby voting and other rights in the enterprise may be transferred readily from one investor to another without reconstituting the organization under law; (3) juridical personality, meaning that the corporation itself as a fictive “person” has legal standing and may thus sue and be sued, may make contracts, and may hold property in a common name; and (4) indefinite duration, whereby the life of the corporation may extend beyond the participation of any of its incorporators. The owners of the corporation in a legal sense are the shareholders, who purchase with their investment of capital a share in the proceeds of the enterprise and who are nominally entitled to a measure of control over the financial management of the corporation.

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business organization: Limited-liability companies, or corporations

The company or corporation, unlike the partnership, is formed not simply by an agreement entered into between its first...

The form of the modern business corporation originated in a fusion of the type of commercial association known as the joint-stock company, which was in fact a partnership, and the traditional legal form of the corporation as it had been developed for medieval guilds, municipalities, monasteries, and universities. Although business corporations were formed in England as early as the 16th century, these enterprises were monopolies chartered by the crown for the pursuit of strict mercantilist policies and were thus closer, in some respects, to the form of the modern public corporation than to that of the private business corporation.

The fusion of the two forms took place incrementally over the first two-thirds of the 19th century in Great Britain, the United States, France, and Germany with the passage of general incorporation laws, which gradually made incorporation a more or less routine matter for business enterprises. Particularly influential for this development in the United States was the fact that powers of incorporation were largely restricted to the individual states under the Constitution, which led in the late 19th century to competition between the states for liberalization of their respective incorporation laws. Given the freedom of interstate commerce guaranteed under the Constitution, would-be incorporators could choose the state in which they wished to incorporate without compromising their freedom to transact business in any other state.

Strong impetus for this fusion of the two forms arose from, and was intensified by, the spread of new capital-intensive technologies of production and transportation. In particular, the construction of railroads—a matter of pressing national importance for all industrializing nations in the late 19th century—required large sums of capital that could be secured only through the corporate form and, in fact, only with many innovations in the development of financial and debt instruments within the corporate form. Moreover, the railroads made possible, and in some cases made necessary, an enormous expansion of existing industries (notably steel and coal) that the corporate form alone could support. By the final third of the 19th century, the last legal obstacles to the corporate form had been removed, and the ensuing period (c. 1870–1910) saw an unprecedented expansion of industrial production and the concomitant predominance of the corporate form. However, with these developments came new problems. Large industrial corporations such as the Standard Oil Company and the United States Steel Corporation came to exercise monopolistic powers in their respective economic spheres, often apparently at the cost of the public interest. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt sought to curb this concentration of corporate power in the early 20th century, urging the enactment of antitrust legislation aimed at preserving competition.