cover image Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs

Gina Keating. Penguin/Portfolio, $26.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-59184-478-5

There's a grim reality behind the magical wafting of DVDs to our mailboxes, according to this lively, canny business potboiler. Freelance journalist Keating tries to style the saga of online movie-rental behemoth Netflix as a Silicon Valley romance wherein subversive geeks conjure "a shared dream of a consumer-oriented company that reflected their ideals," one where "marketing and technology waltz in a harmony." But that conceit fizzles when Reed Hastings, a cyborg with a head full of optimization algorithms but no "empathy gene," takes over as CEO and institutes "an uncomfortable level of process and formality that withered the little company's spontaneous creativity." His corporate despotism works out well, since renting movies online, Keating demonstrates, is just dog-eat-dog commodity retailing that hinges on ruthless cost-cutting and efficiency, careful orchestration of price points with advertising and promotions, and tricks like a recommendation engine that considerately steers customers towards more profitable merchandise. The colorful narrative climaxes with Netflix and archrival Blockbuster throttling each other in an old-fashioned price war that Netflix wins by a hair. Keating hypes the allegedly world-shaking technological transformations in how we access digital content, but what's far more interesting and dramatic is her smart portrait of how an ever-changing capitalism stays very much the same. (Oct. 11)