Netflix streams already rushing past DVDs in 2009?
The business of renting DVDs over the mail has proven to be a hugely popular one for Netflix. The service came out of nowhere to take business from the movie rental behemoth Blockbuster, and now Netflix’s business is thriving while Blockbuster is struggling. But Netflix’s business is shifting also, towards streaming movies over the Internet. And that shift may be happening faster than anyone thought it would.
So far this year, movie streams from Netflix are outpacing DVD shipments for the first time, according to some sample data put together by the Netflix account analysis site FeedFlix. If that pace keeps up, 2009 could be the first year that movie streams outpace rentals on the service.
Now, this data is a bit misleading because it’s only from a sample of FeedFlix users, as the blog Hacking Netflix points out. And these users are undoubtedly more Internet-savvy types and thus more likely to stream movies through Netflix’s Watch Instantly service. But, it still seems reasonable to think that this will be the trend going forward for all Netflix subscribers.
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