Amazon once offered to buy Netflix for $12 million

Jeff Bezos might have saved his company some money -- and a lot of trouble -- had he not tried to lowball Netflix back in 1999.

Netflix CEO tried to negotiate to keep Amazon out of the DVD mail-order rental business, according to an upcoming book.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET )

According to "Netflixed," a history of the DVD-and-streaming pioneer that's due to go on sale Thursday, founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph met with the Amazon CEO in 1999, after he indicated he might want to partner with Netflix in some way.

"Hastings also wanted to discuss selling Netflix to Amazon if the price was right," writes Gina Keating, the former Reuters reporter who authored the book. The only problem was that Hastings was "less than impressed with Amazon's $12 million offer."

He turned it down and Keating doesn't say how much Amazon would have had to sweeten the offer to get him interested. But we do know that Variety and others reported a few years later Hastings offered to sell to Blockbuster for $50 million. Blockbuster declined.

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