Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr.’s Revolutionary Inventions
Academic level is undergraduate senior year，at least three sources，two must be scholarly
5 pages, double-spaced (NOT including headers and properly formatted bibliography)
This assignment asks you to identify and profile a new media/digital media artist, designer or technologist whose life or work you find particularly inspirational. This person (or collaborative team) could be a media artist, videomaker, game designer, web technologist, sound artist, or other creative person whose work could readily be defined as “new media”. Some questions to consider: • Who are they and what do they do? • How has their practice developed or changed over time? • What are some of their projects that particularly inspire you? Why? • How and where has their work been presented and what can you learn from this? • Have they ever experienced any difficulties or challenges that have influenced the development of their work? I encourage you to think very broadly about what might constitute "new media" with respect to this assignment. Think historically. Think globally. This will help broaden the available pool of artists and creative practices to consider and may help you find inspiration in places you might not have thought of before. I also encourage you to find and profile an artist whose work you find particularly inspiring! To help you in your profile, please explicitly consider AT LEAST TWO of the artist's projects. As well, you will be required to find AT LEAST THREE articles (TWO must be scholarly) to help with you develop your ideas about what makes them a creative inspiration.
Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr’s Revolutionary Inventions
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Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr’s Revolutionary Inventions
The world is changing fast due to the inputs of a few individuals who are creative and visionary enough to understand the needs of the future. Presently, the reliance on communication and information technology for entertainment or interaction among family members and peers has increased. In the last two decades, a lot of new media platforms with impacts on people’s entertainment and interactions have emerged. One among such new media platforms is Netflix. Single-handedly, Netflix is one of the organizations that have triggered a revolutionary change in entertainment. Streaming services are a new media platform that is fast changing the architecture of entertainment as it was known traditionally. The emergence and evolution of Netflix are highly attributable to the work of the company’s chief executive officer, Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. This analysis explores Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr in terms of how his practice has evolved, his inspiring inputs to me, and the challenges that he has experienced that influenced the evolution of the new media into what it has become presently.
Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr, commonly known as Reed Hastings, is an American businessman whose inputs in the past two decades have influenced the lives of most people globally. Hastings was born on 0ctober 8, 1960, in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Nover, 2018). In his gap year before heading to college, Hastings sold vacuum cleaners, an experience that he considers to have been engaging. Hastings joined Marine Corps officer training in 1981. He would spend much of his college summers in Marine Corps training. While he did not finish the training to warrant his commissioning into the Marine Corps, Hastings chose to do service in Peace Corps. His decision to join the Peace Corps was majorly due to the need for adventure. As a member of the Peace Corps, he went and taught mathematics in a school of 800 students in Swaziland, Africa, between 1983 and 1985. He describes the experience as a Peace Corp as inspiring, something that steered him into dreaming about becoming an entrepreneur. Upon coming back to the US, Hastings applied for a Master’s degree course in computer science at MIT, where he was rejected. He would pursue the course at Stanford University. That marked his adventure in computer science leading to multiple job experiences as a developer before collaborating with Marc Randolf to create Netflix in 1997. Hasting’s life has been characterized by a series of inspiring events, thereby making him one of the most revolutionary minds in the age of new media.
Hastings and Randolf co-founded Netflix, a video streaming platform, as a start-up in 1997. At the initial stages, Netflix offered flat rate movie rental services to consumers in the US. Hastings and Randolph combined two technologies, DVDs and the internet, to ease their services in the US. They created a website in which people could order the services before they delivered them through mails. While delivering DVDs through mails and communication through the website became popular, it was only the beginning of Hasting’s influence in new media. In 2007, Hastings confessed to having noted streaming services as a new platform that could change the entire prospect of entertainment (Nover, 2018). Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed continuously from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network foundations. Hastings notes that he did not believe that people would adopt the idea of streaming services. Presently, Netflix is the largest streaming services platform in the world, and the innovation has created a platform for intense competition with some of the largest and most resourced media outlets in the world.
Hasting’s work has evolved to foster the best possible outcomes in the media industry. Upon the formation of Netflix, Hasting’s motivation was to grow the company within the US. At the time, online sales of DVDs were unheard of, and only a few individuals indulged in the business. Hastings mainly focused on marketing and positioning its services as convenient and unlike any other entertainment platform. The emphasis on marketing would change around 2007 when Hastings embarked on software development. With the increased consumption of internet services globally, Hastings found an opportunity to create streaming services. This advancement instilled the biggest change in his career path, with Netflix g...