Netflix Founder Named to Microsoft Board

Reed Hastings, the chairman and CEO of online movie rental company Netflix, has been named to Microsoft’s board of directors, the company announced in Mar. 2007.

Founded by Hastings in 1997, Netflix mails rental DVDs (and, more recently, high-definition DVDs in both the HD DVD and Blu-ray formats) to consumers’ homes for a monthly subscription fee. The company, which has doubled its subscriber base to 6.3 million since 2005, has disrupted the business of traditional movie rental chains, such as Blockbuster, which in Aug. 2004 instituted a similar subscription-based delivery service in response. In the long run, however, Hastings believes that disc-based movie rentals will be replaced by online delivery. This belief maps well to Microsoft’s goals of positioning the Windows PC, Xbox game console, and other Microsoft products as multipurpose home entertainment devices. In particular, Microsoft is the first online distributor of high-definition TV shows and movies through its Xbox Live Marketplace. Hastings has a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford, and in 1991 he founded Pure Software, which created a popular software debugging tool and was acquired by Rational Software in 1997.