The high tech behind Netflix’s old-school DVD service - The Verge

Netflix began to offer streaming as an added benefit to its DVD subscribers in 2007, and a lot of things the company had built for its DVD website came in handy to get streaming off the ground. The queue subscribers used to preorder DVDs essentially became the precursor to today’s watchlist, and the recommendation engine Netflix had built to suggest new movies and shows to subscribers was adapted for streaming as well. “There was plenty of technology shared,” recalled Johnson.