From Rent It – $4.00
to Starts at $7.99

Back then it was NetFlix, with a capital F, and its homepage read like the back of a video-store catalogue. Our January 17, 1999 capture is headed Featured DVDs for Saturday, January 16, 1999: eight films, each with a paragraph written in-house. Six can be rented at $4.00, two reserved at $5.00. Blade is a half-human, half-vampire sworn to protect humanity; The Negotiator is tense and smart. Above each blurb sit two links, Rent It – $4.00 and Remind Me!, and several blurbs end with a link to a themed collection: Bloodsucking Blockbusters, Police Partnerships, Complicated Couples, Swordfights and Swashbuckling.

The store had opened on April 14, 1998, as the first internet store to rent DVDs, with more than 900 titles.¹ Nine months later the page counts Over 2,600 DVDs to rent! At launch a rental lasted seven days and cost $4, plus $2 to ship it both ways, so one disc came to $6; it went back in a prepaid envelope.¹ Keep it too long and you paid a late fee.³

The launch offer had a twist, too: under Like It? Keep It! you emailed Netflix and bought the disc, with the rental fee taken off the price.¹

Another line on the page looks odd today: Rent from NetFlix.com, Buy from Amazon.com! Netflix was handing DVD sales to Amazon and stopped selling new DVDs that March²; a few months earlier, in 1998, Jeff Bezos had even explored buying the company, and the founders said no.⁴

A year later the editors are still there, with Leonard Maltin's Top 5 DVDs for January, the Ask Mr. DVD! column that was new in 1999, a pick of speaker-busting DVDs to test your surround sound. The catalogue has doubled: Now with over 5,300 DVD titles to rent!

The new thing is in the header, in small type: So Far You've Rated 0 Movies. Netflix wanted you to rate films so that its software, CineMatch, could predict what else you'd like.² By 2002 the company said it was making more than 18 million personal recommendations a day.² In 2006 Netflix would offer a million dollars to anyone who could make those guesses 10% more accurate.²³

Next to it is a link called Try Marquee. That was the subscription Netflix had launched in September 1999, $15.95 a month for four rentals, which in February 2000 went unlimited for $19.95.² The page explains it in one line: With the new NetFlix Marquee program, you'll always have movies at home. No due dates. No late fees. Ever! According to co-founder Marc Randolph, the same year he and Reed Hastings offered to sell the whole company to Blockbuster, and were laughed out of the room.⁶

Rent all the DVD movies you want. For 20 bucks a month. No late fees.netflix.com headline, June 2001

By June 2001 the editors have shrunk to an EXPERTS menu in the sidebar and the deal is the whole page. Even the title in the browser tab is the pitch now: Rent as many DVDs as you want for $20 a month. No late fees.⁷ Next to the catalogue count, the homepage now counts its customers too: Browse our 10,000 movie titles, More than 300,000 active members, and a boast that Netflix is Top 2 in satisfaction (right up there with Amazon!).

The September 2002 page adds a computer lesson. Before you can sign up, it explains what a cookie is, a block of text that a Web site sends to your Internet browser, and gives step-by-step instructions to switch cookies on in Internet Explorer 5.0, Internet Explorer 6.0 and Netscape Communicator 4. The final button: My Cookies Are Activated!

For most of the decade the deal holds, and the homepage shows off the red envelope that makes it work: in January 2003 a woman holds one up next to Try NETFLIX today!, with badges from Time's 50 Best Web Sites 2002 and Forbes' Best of the Web further down. What really changes is the numbers. From capture to capture the page updates its own scoreboard:

The 2005 page sums it up as The #1 Online DVD Rental Service with more than 3,000,000 members! and adds a line aimed squarely at the video store: No Driving. No Lines. No Hassles. In 2006 the pitch becomes The Best Way to Rent Movies, with a family on the sofa and red envelopes on the coffee table, and in 2007 red fills the whole page around them.

Patents and a million-dollar prize in the footer

The small print at the bottom of these pages tells its own story. By June 2004 it carries a patent number, U.S. Patent No. 6584450, later joined by 7,024,381. They were Netflix's patents on its rental method, and in April 2006 Netflix sued Blockbuster for infringing them.⁸ The two settled in June 2007.⁹ By 2011 the footer lists five patents.

From 2007 the footer also links to the Netflix Prize, the million-dollar contest to sharpen the guesses behind that rating counter. It was awarded on September 21, 2009, to a team called BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos.¹⁰¹¹ Netflix paid the million but never put the winning blend to work: in 2012 its engineers wrote that the extra accuracy did not justify the engineering effort. Two algorithms from an earlier round of the contest did go in.²³

The footer says Watch Instantly

The footer is also where streaming first shows up. On January 16, 2007 Netflix let subscribers watch instantly on their PCs, with about 1,000 titles, next to more than 70,000 on DVD.¹² And it was rationed: the $5.99 plan got six hours of watching a month, the $17.99 plan 18 hours.¹² Three two-hour films and that plan's month was used up.

The homepage barely noticed. Here is how streaming climbs the page:

In June 2010 streaming makes the headline, two years after it first reached TVs, and it arrives with a game console. The page now sells two things side by side: Streaming instantly over the Internet to your TV on the left, PLUS, DVDs by mail on the right. The tab title changes to match: TV & movies instantly streamed online + DVD & Blu-ray rentals. The page's code still keeps two counts, 100,000 titles on disc and 17,000 to stream. In September Netflix opened in Canada, its first country outside the US, with streaming only.¹³

Instantly watch as many movies as you want. For only $7.99 a month.netflix.com headline, June 2011, next to a Wii, a PS3, an Xbox and a laptop

One year later the envelope is gone from the page, and the tab title reads Watch TV Shows Online, Watch Movies Online, which it still does in 2026. A small country switch appears in the footer: United States | Canada.

Qwikster, called off after three weeks

On September 19, 2011 Netflix announced that the DVDs would move to a separate website called Qwikster. On October 10 it called the split off. Subscribers did not want two accounts, two websites and two passwords, and Netflix agreed: two websites would make things more difficult.¹⁴¹⁵ Our captures never show Qwikster: the January 2012 homepage keeps the 2011 headline and layout, with new pictures on the TV.

Watch TV shows & movies anytime, anywhere. Only $7.99 a month. The 2013 page has no members and no titles on it any more: the scoreboard that grew for a decade is simply gone. What it lists instead are screens, PS3, Wii, Xbox, PC, Mac, Mobile, Tablet and more, and a phone line, Questions? Call 1-866-402-2612 24 hours a day.

The shows appear only as tiny posters on the TV in the photo, even though House of Cards had premiered that February.¹⁶ The biggest visual change is small: in May 2014 the logo loses its shadow, and the white letters on a red band become flat red letters.¹⁷

On January 6, 2016 Netflix switched on in more than 130 new countries at once.¹⁸ The homepage changes its tone the same year: it stops selling a way to watch and starts selling what's on. See what's next., white on a tilted wall of posters, with Join free for a month underneath.

The films are the decoration now, not the product. The wall mixes Netflix's own shows with other studios' films, as pictures only: no blurbs, no prices, nothing to click.

The 2019 page spells out the trial: All of Netflix. Free for 30 days., then a little timeline of the trial, FIRST BILL 7/15 with a 3 day reminder before it, and a Stranger Things poster with the word Downloading…, for saving shows to watch offline. Its What is Netflix? answer, folded away in the FAQ, promises you can watch as much as you want, whenever you want without a single commercial.

After that, the trial timeline is gone. 2020: Unlimited movies, TV shows, and more., with a TRY 30 DAYS FREE button. By July 2021 the same button just says Get Started, and the free month is gone. Three years after that ad-free promise, in November 2022, Netflix added its first plan with ads, at $6.99 a month in the US.¹⁹

The DVDs never vanished. They just left the homepage. For twelve years after 2011 the red envelopes kept coming by mail, to people who never saw them on the front page, until Netflix mailed its last discs on September 29, 2023.²⁰²¹ The homepage from that June doesn't mention them at all.

By December 2024 the ads are the way in: Starts at $6.99 in the headline, and below it a banner that reads The Netflix you love for just $6.99. That is the plan with ads. In June 2025 the same line says Starts at $7.99.

Scroll down the February 2026 homepage and you find something the 1999 one had: a list of titles. It's called Trending Now and it is numbered, 1 to 10: Bridgerton, Stranger Things, The Rip… In 1999 eight films were picked by editors, described in a paragraph each and priced one by one, most at $4.00. In 2026 ten are numbered, posters with no blurbs and no prices.

Put the first and the last page side by side. Drag the handle to rewind.

JAN 1999 · $4.00 a disc2026 · one monthly fee

In 1999, each featured movie on this homepage had its own price. In 2026 the pitch doesn't name one.Just a monthly fee, for everything.