MIT MANAGEMENT SLOAN SCHOOL Netflix Goes to Bollywood Donald Sull and Stefano Turconi 21-201 January 30, 2021 py For the first fifty years of television, broadcasters determined what viewers could watch and when they could watch it. Consumers faced limited choices, had to arrange their schedule to watch a show when it was broadcast, wait a week for the next episode, and sit through frequent commercials breaks. Streaming video pioneers Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video shifted the power to the viewers: they assembled large libraries of content and made these shows, movies, and documentaries available over the Internet, so that audiences could watch what they wanted, when they wanted, for as long as they wanted, without commercial interruptions. By 2019, 40% of Americans watched multiple episodes of TV shows in sequence (known as binge-watching) every week. Since its founding in 1997, Netflix evolved from a mail-order DVD rental company to the world's leading streaming video on demand (SVOD) provider. By 2019, Netflix was the dominant SVOD platform, with 167 million paid subscribers around the world and an enterprise value of $157 billion (see the tab N summary in the case data supplement for an overview of Netflix operating and financial data). Viewers voraciously consumed the company's content-the average number of hours subscribers spent watching Netflix each day increased four-fold between 2010 and 2015. Unlike Disney or NBC Universal, Netflix did not enter streaming video with a large library of content (tab movie franchises). Instead, Netflix rose to industry leadership by successfully seizing a series of opportunities to grow its business. To transition from DVD rentals to online streaming, Netflix licensed popular content, including Disney's Marvel Avengers, NBC's The Office and Warner's Friends, from major media companies. In 2013, Netflix launched its first major original series, House of Cards, and later built an in-house studio to ramp up the number of original TV series and movies it could produce. In 2019 alone, Netflix invested $15 billion to produce original series and 'movies, outspending any TV This case was prepared by Donald Sull, Senior Lecturer MIT Sloan School of Management, and Stefano Turconi, Teaching Fellow, London Business School. Harini Panda and Nadi Kassim, MIT Sloan School MBAS class of 2021, collected data and supported the case preparation. Copyright 2021 Donald Sull. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license visit Creative Commons' site or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.