Netflix

Netflix is the largest streaming-video service globally by subscribers and revenue, with 285+ million paid memberships across 190+ countries as of 2025. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph as a DVD-by-mail rental service in Los Gatos, California, the company pivoted to streaming in 2007 and to original content production with House of Cards in 2013. Netflix trades on NASDAQ as NFLX and is one of the largest media companies in the world. The company employs approximately 13,000 workers globally.

Netflix has been one of the most aggressive content-investment companies in history — annual content spend exceeded $17 billion in 2024 across films, episodic series, animation, documentaries, and the rapidly-growing live-events segment (NFL Christmas Day games, WWE Raw, Tyson-Paul boxing). The company's expansion into ad-supported streaming (the Standard with Ads tier launched 2022) has grown to approximately 70 million subscribers as of 2025 and is one of the larger US connected-TV ad inventory sources. Netflix Games (the cloud-gaming initiative integrated with the streaming service) has been a smaller-but-growing strategic bet.

Netflix has been an AI-leader in content recommendation since the 2006 Netflix Prize competition (which crowdsourced ML approaches to movie recommendation). The current recommendation system processes hundreds of signals per user per session — viewing history, completion rate, time-of-day patterns, in-session behavior, and increasingly content-metadata signals from Netflix's deep-content-tagging operation. Beyond recommendation, Netflix has been a leader in AI dubbing and localization (the Netflix AI Dubbing initiative, in partnership with Deepdub and ElevenLabs); content moderation and copyright detection; production-side AI for editing, color grading, and visual effects; and the AI-augmented marketing and trailer-creation operations. The 2023 WGA / SAG-AFTRA strikes resulted in contract terms that constrain how AI can be used in original-content development at Netflix as at other major studios — but the company's broader AI strategy continues to expand outside the US production-talent contract framework.