Technology History | 100 Winchester Circle — The Streaming Button, and the Box That Left

Netflix started streaming from this address on 16 January 2007, with about 1,000 titles against the 70,000 it held on disc. The feature was called Watch Now and cost nothing extra, because viewing was rationed instead: roughly an hour of video for every dollar of the monthly plan, six hours at $5.99 and eighteen at $17.99. It played in a browser on a Windows PC, and only a fraction of the company's six million subscribers got it on the day. About 250,000 more were switched on each week until June, so the load arrived in steps the servers could carry. The address is on the record. Netflix's filings that winter give its principal executive offices as 100 Winchester Circle, Los Gatos, and the company budgeted roughly $40 million of extra spending on streaming for the year. It was building hardware here at the same time, under the codename Griffin: a Netflix-branded set-top box, run by Anthony Wood, who was vice-president of internet television at the company from April 2007 to January 2008. Weeks from shipping, Reed Hastings killed it, on the reasoning that a company selling its own box would struggle to get its service onto everybody else's. The team was spun out instead, and the machine reached shops in May 2008 as the Roku DVP N1000. Roku's own stock-market prospectus gives its principal executive offices as 150 Winchester Circle, the next building on this loop of road. The monument sign in the photograph, taken in 2019, carries both names for that reason. Netflix moved its main campus half a mile to Albright Way in 2015. In 2022 it put the Winchester Circle space up for sublease, 165,000 square feet it said it no longer needed. A level crossing runs past the entrance, and the photograph is taken from the far side of the track. Photo: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons