Netflix hires DivX executive Bill Holmes
Digital-media veteran to help build streaming business
By Danny King -- Video Business, 9/2/2008
SEPT. 2 | Netflix has hired Bill Holmes, a five-year veteran of digital-media company DivX, to head its business-development efforts as it continues to try to boost sales from its video-streaming service.
Netflix, the largest U.S. movie-rental service via mail, said today that it brought on Holmes to help embed software into more devices that will allow customers to stream content from Netflix. Holmes negotiated licensing agreements with companies such as Qualcomm, Matsushita and SanDisk when he was with DivX.
Netflix has been trying to build on its 8.4 million subscriber base with its streaming services. This month, LG Electronics will start selling a Blu-ray Disc player that instantly links to Netflix’s 12,000-title streaming service. In July, Netflix expanded its partnership with Microsoft that allows customers to stream Netflix’s movies and TV shows through Microsoft’s Xbox 360 videogame console.
"Bill Holmes will lead the ever-increasing effort by Netflix to develop more partnerships with great consumer electronics companies as we enter the era of Web-on-TV," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in a statement.
In May, Netflix introduced a set-top box allowing customers to stream from an inventory of about 10% of its 100,000 titles. Later that month, Hastings said products such as Netflix Player by Roku, which had to be back-ordered within three weeks of its introduction, would double the company’s subscriber base within a decade.
Holmes started the DivX Certified program with the San Diego-based company, whose revenue jumped 43% last year to $84.9 million. That program, which tracks all components containing devices either produced or licensed by DivX, encompasses more than 100 million devices made by companies such as Sony, Samsung and Toshiba.
