Netflix
Deconstructing the virtual shelves of Netflix.com
The first video rental store opened in 1977, created by George Atkinson in Los Angeles. It offered an amazing 50 videos (the only videos available to the public at the time), and was named “Video Station”. The charge for a rental was $10 a day, provided you had a membership, which was $50 annually or $100 for a lifetime. By 2004 the video rental business reached it’s peak, the largest of those businesses being Blockbuster, which had 9,000 stores, 60,000 employees and $5.9 billion in revenue.
The DVD was invented in 1995. The first Hollywood movie available on DVD was Twister. In 2003 DVD rentals surpassed VHS rentals.
Netflix was founded in 1997 as an online rental company, introducing subscription services in 1999. In 2007 they introduced their streaming service (marking the beginning of the end for “brick-and-mortar” video rental stores).
In 2010 Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. On November 13th 2013, the very last video rented at Blockbuster was fittingly, “This Is The End”.
In 2014, Netflix had 50 million subscribers, and $5.5 billion in revenue.
(Congratulations, you made to the bottom of the site)
The average shelf inside a Blockbuster (R.I.P.) was approximately 60 inches tall with 5 display shelves. If the Netflix homepage where recreated as a Blockbuster (R.I.P.) shelf, it would be 35 feet tall — or roughly a 3 story building. That’s an overwhelming amount of movies to scan to find “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension”.
No designer has taken the “above the fold” rule seriously for more than 15 years — since the commonality of the scroll wheel (which was popularized by 1997), let alone the absurdity in defining what “the fold” is, with all the various screen sizes of monitors and laptops, but I digress. A recent(ish) trend, when designing for entities with large quantities of content, seems to embrace a purposeful disregard for curating and cultivating content into a hierarchy that delivers what is most useful, popular, or meaningful to users; instead opting for a more “this is everything we have, go find it yourself, and good luck, we’re all counting on you” (ok, that last part is from Airplane!) approach.
I don’t want to claim that it’s a good trend or bad trend, or that it’s even a trend at all (or merely isolated instances). Human nature dictates that our response to common held practices is either to continue them, or react to them like a pendulum — whatever was standard at one time will swing in the complete opposite direction. Web design has gone from the small confines of fitting content “above the fold”, to creating websites so long and large, that it’s like trying to find a fly on a window of the Burj Khalifa.
And somewhere between a trailer home and the tallest building in the world, Netflix chose the tallest building in the world. Happy scrolling.
