Netflix: MBA Spotlight Company

Netflix explores how founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph turned a small DVD rental service into a global media empire, leading the way in the streaming revolution and pioneering new ways to study TV audiences. Features include a glossary, references, websites, source notes, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

This title examines the remarkable lives of Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph and their work building the groundbreaking company Netflix. Readers will learn about each founder's background and education, as well as his early career. Also covered is a look at how Netflix operates, issues the company faces, its successes, and its impact on society. Color photos and informative sidebars accompany easy-to-read, compelling text. Features include a timeline, facts, additional resources, Web sites, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards.Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

How streaming services and internet distribution have transformed global television culture. Television, once a broadcast medium, now also travels through our telephone lines, fiber optic cables, and wireless networks. It is delivered to viewers via apps, screens large and small, and media players of all kinds. In this unfamiliar environment, new global giants of television distribution are emerging--including Netflix, the world's largest subscription video-on-demand service. Combining media industry analysis with cultural theory, Ramon Lobato explores the political and policy tensions at the heart of the digital distribution revolution, tracing their longer history through our evolving understanding of media globalization. Netflix Nations considers the ways that subscription video-on-demand services, but most of all Netflix, have irrevocably changed the circulation of media content. It tells the story of how a global video portal interacts with national audiences, markets, and institutions, and what this means for how we understand global media in the internet age. Netflix Nations addresses a fundamental tension in the digital media landscape - the clash between the internet's capacity for global distribution and the territorial nature of media trade, taste, and regulation. The book also explores the failures and frictions of video-on-demand as experienced by audiences. The actual experience of using video platforms is full of subtle reminders of market boundaries and exclusions: platforms are geo-blocked for out-of-region users ("this video is not available in your region"); catalogs shrink and expand from country to country; prices appear in different currencies; and subtitles and captions are not available in local languages. These conditions offer rich insight for understanding the actual geographies of digital media distribution. Contrary to popular belief, the story of Netflix is not just an American one. From Argentina to Australia, Netflix's ascension from a Silicon Valley start-up to an international television service has transformed media consumption on a global scale. Netflix Nations will help readers make sense of a complex, ever-shifting streaming media environment.

Netflix is the definitive media company of the 21st century. It was among the first to parlay new Internet technologies into a successful business model, and in the process it changed how consumers access film and television. It is now one of the leading providers of digitally delivered media content and is continually expanding access across a host of platforms and mobile devices. Despite its transformative role, however, Netflix has drawn very little critical attention-far less than competitors such as YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Comcast, and HBO. This collection addresses this gap, as the essays are designed to critically explore the breadth and diversity of Netflix's effect from a variety of different scholarly perspectives, a necessary approach considering the hybrid nature of Netflix, its inextricable links to new models of media production, distribution, viewer engagement and consumer behavior, its relationship to existing media conglomerates and consumer electronics, its capabilities as a web-based service provider and data network, and its reliance on a broader technological infrastructure.

Film stocks are vanishing, but the iconic images of the silver screen remain--albeit in new, sleeker formats. Today, viewers can instantly stream movies on televisions, computers, and smartphones. Gone are the days when films could only be seen in theaters or rented at video stores: movies are now accessible at the click of a button, and there are no reels, tapes, or discs to store. Any film or show worth keeping may be collected in the virtual cloud and accessed at will through services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Instant. The movies have changed, and we are changing with them. The ways we communicate, receive information, travel, and socialize have all been revolutionized. In Streaming, Wheeler Winston Dixon reveals the positive and negative consequences of the transition to digital formatting and distribution, exploring the ways in which digital cinema has altered contemporary filmmaking and our culture. Many industry professionals and audience members feel that the new format fundamentally alters the art, while others laud the liberation of the moving image from the "imperfect" medium of film, asserting that it is both inevitable and desirable. Dixon argues that the change is neither good nor bad; it's simply a fact. Hollywood has embraced digital production and distribution because it is easier, faster, and cheaper, but the displacement of older technology will not come without controversy. This groundbreaking book illuminates the challenges of preserving media in the digital age and explores what stands to be lost, from the rich hues of traditional film stocks to the classic movies that are not profitable enough to offer in streaming formats. Dixon also investigates the financial challenges of the new distribution model, the incorporation of new content such as webisodes, and the issue of ownership in an age when companies have the power to pull purchased items from consumer devices at their own discretion. Streaming touches on every aspect of the shift to digital production and distribution. It explains not only how the new technology is affecting movies, music, books, and games, but also how instant access is permanently changing the habits of viewers and influencing our culture.

As Hollywood shifts towards the digital era, the role of the media franchise has become more prominent. This edited collection, from a range of international scholars, argues that the franchise is now an integral element of American media culture. As such, the collection explores the production, distribution and marketing of franchises as a historical form of media-making - analysing the complex industrial practice of managing franchises across interconnected online platforms. Examining how traditional media incumbents like studios and networks have responded to the rise of new entrants from the technology sector (such as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google), the authors take a critical look at the way new and old industrial logics collide in an increasingly fragmented and consolidated mediascape.

Leverage digital technologies to achieve competitive advantage through market-leading processes, products and services, customer relationships, and innovation How does Information Technology enable competitive advantage? Digital Disciplines details four strategies that exploit today's digital technologies to create unparalleled customer value. Using non-technical language, this book describes the blueprints that any company, large or small, can use to gain or retain market leadership, based on insights derived from examining modern digital giants such as Amazon, Netflix, and Uber, established firms such as Burberry, GE, Nike, and Procter & Gamble, and lesser-known innovators such as Alvio, Fruition Sciences, Opower, and Quirky. Companies can develop a competitive edge through four digital disciplines--information excellence, solution leadership, collective intimacy, and accelerated innovation--that exploit cloud computing, big data and analytics, mobile and wireline networks, social media, and the Internet of Things. These four disciplines extend and update the value disciplines of operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy originally defined by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema in their bestselling business classic The Discipline of Market Leaders. Operational excellence must now be complemented by information excellence--leveraging automation, information, analytics, and sophisticated algorithms to make processes faster, better, and more cost-effective, seamlessly fuse digital and physical worlds, and generate new revenue through techniques such as exhaust data monetization Product leadership must be extended to solution leadership--smart digital products and services ranging from wind turbines and wearables to connected healthcare, linked to each other, cloud services, social networks, and partner ecosystems, focused on customer outcomes and creating experiences and transformations Customer intimacy is evolving to collective intimacy--as face-to-face relationships not only go online, but are collectively analyzed to provide individually targeted recommendations and personalized services ranging from books and movies to patient-specific therapies Traditional innovation is no longer enough--accelerated innovation goes beyond open innovation to exploit crowdsourcing, idea markets, innovation networks, challenges, and contest economics to dramatically improve processes, products, and relationships This book provides a strategy framework, empirical data, case studies, deep insights, and pragmatic steps for any enterprise to follow and attain market leadership in today's digital era.  It addresses improved execution through techniques such as gamification, and pitfalls to beware, including cybersecurity, privacy, and unintended consequences. Digital Disciplines can be exploited by existing firms or start-ups to disrupt established ways of doing business through innovative, digitally enabled value propositions to win in competitive markets in today's digital era.

"One of the most mesmerizing and important books I've read in quite some time. Alter brilliantly illuminates the new obsessions that are controlling our lives and offers the tools we need to rescue our businesses, our families, and our sanity." --Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take Welcome to the age of behavioral addiction--an age in which half of the American population is addicted to at least one behavior. We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube videos; we work longer hours each year; and we spend an average of three hours each day using our smartphones. Half of us would rather suffer a broken bone than a broken phone, and Millennial kids spend so much time in front of screens that they struggle to interact with real, live humans.   In this revolutionary book, Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction, and explains why so many of today's products are irresistible. Though these miraculous products melt the miles that separate people across the globe, their extraordinary and sometimes damaging magnetism is no accident. The companies that design these products tweak them over time until they become almost impossible to resist.   By reverse engineering behavioral addiction, Alter explains how we can harness addictive products for the good--to improve how we communicate with each other, spend and save our money, and set boundaries between work and play--and how we can mitigate their most damaging effects on our well-being, and the health and happiness of our children. Adam Alter's previous book, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave is available in paperback from Penguin.

BE HYPER-SOCIAL. GET HYPER-SUCCESSFUL. "A thought-provoking read and a comprehensive introduction to today''s business challenges as social media and social networking become increasingly vital to success. . . . Highly recommended." --Choice magazine "If you want to really understand what makes some online communities thrive while others shrivel and fade, you have come to the right place. Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran understand just what makes us all so social--as customers, as employees, and as business partners--both online and off." -- David Rogers, executive director, Columbia Business School Center on Global Brand Leadership,author of The Network Is Your Customer "The Hyper-Social Organization is not simply a guide to navigate through the fundamental and far-reaching transformations of today caused by social media, but it also provides insight into how to optimize and profit from it." -- Mark Yolton, senior vice president, SAP "To the extent that we can be ''human'' with what we know--and share it as freely as we possibly can--we''ll go a long way toward fostering a deeper level of trust with consumers. The Hyper-Social Organization not only explains why that happens--it also provides a road map for how to embed it in all your customer-facing processes." -- Barry Judge, CMO, Best Buy "Rather than getting hung up on the ''media'' side of social media, Gossieaux and Moran have figured out that the real killer app is the ability to create a 1:1 communication between your customers and your brand." -- Marty St. George, CMO, JetBlue "With this book''s simple yet profound prescriptions for all parts of the organization, Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran have distilled the chaos, excitement, and fear business is feeling from a world gone social into an elegant framework of understanding. (And I''m buying books for my whole tribe.)" -- Janet Swaysland, SVP of Social Media, Monster.com About the Book: Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. LinkedIn. Unless you''re living in the Stone Age, it''s hard to ignore all the social networking tools that have taken the world by storm. To keep up--and stay competitive--you need to rethink how your organization interacts with this brave new world. You need to stop marketing to consumers and start socializing with communities who know what they like and aren''t afraid to share it. You need to understand the power of social media--and use it to your best advantage. You need The Hyper-Social Organization. Based on the famous "Tribalization of Business Study"--a wide-ranging annual survey conducted by Francois Gossieaux of Beeline Labs and Ed Moran of Deloitte--this is the definitive guide to using social media for organizational success. The book''s surprising findings and in-depth interviews will challenge everything you know about corporate-consumer relations--starting with The 5 Steps to Being Hyper-Social: Forget technology--understand the four drivers of successful communities. Forget market segments and consumers--think tribes and humans. Forget company-centricity-- think human-centricity. Forget channels--think networks. Forget process and hierarchies-- think social messiness. Social media is changing the world as we know it. This book shows you how to change your organization and be on the leading edge of the movement. Instead of marketing to general target groups, Gossieaux and Moran reveal how you can refocus your efforts to home in on what matters most to people--the communities or "tribes" that are at the core of their "identities"--and unite them through their shared passions, problems, responsibilities, wants, and needs. You''ll discover how to establish a real human presence on the Web and in social media communities and sites to open up a naturally flowing, mutual--and mutually beneficial--exchange of ideas and information. And