Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr.’s Revolutionary Inventions

Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr’s Revolutionary Inventions
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Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr’s Revolutionary Inventions
The world is changing fast due to the inputs of a few individuals who are creative and visionary enough to understand the needs of the future. Presently, the reliance on communication and information technology for entertainment or interaction among family members and peers has increased. In the last two decades, a lot of new media platforms with impacts on people’s entertainment and interactions have emerged. One among such new media platforms is Netflix. Single-handedly, Netflix is one of the organizations that have triggered a revolutionary change in entertainment. Streaming services are a new media platform that is fast changing the architecture of entertainment as it was known traditionally. The emergence and evolution of Netflix are highly attributable to the work of the company’s chief executive officer, Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. This analysis explores Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr in terms of how his practice has evolved, his inspiring inputs to me, and the challenges that he has experienced that influenced the evolution of the new media into what it has become presently.
Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr, commonly known as Reed Hastings, is an American businessman whose inputs in the past two decades have influenced the lives of most people globally. Hastings was born on 0ctober 8, 1960, in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Nover, 2018). In his gap year before heading to college, Hastings sold vacuum cleaners, an experience that he considers to have been engaging. Hastings joined Marine Corps officer training in 1981. He would spend much of his college summers in Marine Corps training. While he did not finish the training to warrant his commissioning into the Marine Corps, Hastings chose to do service in Peace Corps. His decision to join the Peace Corps was majorly due to the need for adventure. As a member of the Peace Corps, he went and taught mathematics in a school of 800 students in Swaziland, Africa, between 1983 and 1985. He describes the experience as a Peace Corp as inspiring, something that steered him into dreaming about becoming an entrepreneur. Upon coming back to the US, Hastings applied for a Master’s degree course in computer science at MIT, where he was rejected. He would pursue the course at Stanford University. That marked his adventure in computer science leading to multiple job experiences as a developer before collaborating with Marc Randolf to create Netflix in 1997. Hasting’s life has been characterized by a series of inspiring events, thereby making him one of the most revolutionary minds in the age of new media.
Hastings and Randolf co-founded Netflix, a video streaming platform, as a start-up in 1997. At the initial stages, Netflix offered flat rate movie rental services to consumers in the US. Hastings and Randolph combined two technologies, DVDs and the internet, to ease their services in the US. They created a website in which people could order the services before they delivered them through mails. While delivering DVDs through mails and communicati...