Netflix to Offer Broadband Downloads

LOS GATOS, January 16: The
online movie rental company Netflix is launching a new feature that allows
subscribers to download movies and TV series instead of waiting for the DVD to
arrive in the mail.

Netflix will make the
new feature available to its subscribers in a phased rollout over the next six
months. Subscribers will continue to receive DVDs by mail from the company's
catalog of over 70,000 titles, and will be able to select from about 1,000
movies and TV series to download to their PCs. Downloadable content will come
from NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures,
Warner Bros., New Line Cinema and Lionsgate, as well as A&E Television
Networks, BBC Worldwide, Palm Pictures, Starz Digital and ThinkFilm, among
others.

The new feature will be
included in subscribers' monthly membership plans at no additional cost. It
uses real-time playback technology that allows video to be viewed at virtually
the same time it is being delivered to a user's computer. The hours available
for instant watching will vary based on subscribers' monthly plans. Subscribers
on the entry-level $5.99 plan will have six hours of online movie watching per
month. Those on the $17.99 unlimited DVD rental plan and three discs out at a
time will have 18 hours of online movie watching per month.

"We named our
company Netflix in 1998 because we believed Internet-based movie rental
represented the future, first as a means of improving service and selection,
and then as a means of movie delivery," said Reed Hastings, the company's
CEO. "While mainstream consumer adoption of online movie watching will
take a number of years due to content and technology hurdles, the time is right
for Netflix to take the first step.”

Hastings continued,
"Over the coming years we'll expand our selection of films, and we'll work
to get to every Internet-connected screen, from cell phones to PCs to plasma
screens. The PC screen is the best Internet-connected screen today, so we are
starting there."