Unlike most companies during the recession, Netflix has shown growth with its recent additions to the movie rental company. Netflix grew 26% over the last year with 9,390,000 subscribers at the end of 2008. Netflix did report a slow fourth-quarter for 2008, but an overall growth for the year.
Netflix has recently showed two significantly growing changes to the way they distribute content to the customer. One major change was streaming on the Xbox360 console, bringing movies, TV shows and other content directly to the living room over a streaming broadband connection. The other major success was the switch to adopt Blu-ray in its mail delivery system, where nearly 700,000 subscribers were renting Blu-ray disks from Netflix, where Netflix started distributing the content in February.
Netflix also reported upcoming additions to the company to include streaming content directly into the living room with broadband compatible HDTV"s from LG Electronics, which supports Netflix streaming software built into the TV"s, to eliminate the need for a set top box.
Vizio and Netflix have also joined up to have streaming HDTV content directly to the TV sets, based on the new Connected HDTV platform, which plans to ship nationwide later this year.
Roku, a digital video set-top box, allows users to stream pay-per-view content from Amazon.com in its Netflix-enabled box.