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Netflix has become the dominant player in the video-on-demand streaming market but things could’ve been a little different if Janet Jackson didn’t have her famous nip slip at the Superbowl in 2004.

Let me explain.

Netflix started out as a company which sent DVDs to its customers in the mail. In fact, last year 4.2 million people in the US still rented physical DVDs via the mail from Netflix, down from its peak of 20 million in 2010.

However, Netflix was keenly aware that the rise of the internet offered immense opportunity for its business.

“Around the time of YouTube’s founding in 2005, I was working at Netflix,” Robert Kyncl wrote for Recode.

“One day, my bosses, Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings, asked for a volunteer to help lead a new side project: Instead of mailing out physical DVDs to customers, could we figure out a way for our customers to view films and TV shows digitally, over the internet?”

According to Kyncl, who is now the Chief Business Officer at YouTube, Netflix began working on a “Netflix box” for the home to enable customers to download movies in their living room but the company ran into difficulties creating the box and acquiring the rights to download movies.

Then YouTube came along and changed the game. Lots of the videos uploaded to the site were of poor quality but it was the convenience and ease of access that clearly resulted in huge numbers of viewers.

“YouTube clearly demonstrated that people were willing to trade fidelity for convenience and speed. Witnessing the popularity of YouTube was a revelation. And it caused us to stop our launch and pivot to a service that would allow consumers to stream movies remotely instead of downloading them,” Kyncl wrote.

“Finally, in 2007, we launched Netflix streaming because we saw the potential that YouTube presented.”

So what does a nipple slip have to do with anything?

Well, the catalyst for the Netflix streaming service was seeing the success and potential of YouTube. And the catalyst for YouTube was, well, boobs.

YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim reportedly started workshopping the idea at a dinner party in San Francisco in 2004.

As Jawed Karim told USA Today in 2006, YouTube was partially inspired by Janet Jackson’s famous nipple slip during the half time show of the Superbowl in 2004, as well as a tsunami in Asia that same year. More specifically, it was born out of the fact that it wasn’t particularly easy at the time to find videos of those events online.

As USA Today wrote: “Karim recalled the difficulty involved in finding and watching videos online of Jackson accidentally baring her breast during the Super Bowl show.”

And as the saying goes, necessity is the father of invention.

There are, of course, an almost infinite number of other forces and factors which resulted in Netflix becoming the streaming king, but nonetheless, this particular flap of the butterfly’s wings is an easy one to trace, and at the very least a fun thought experiment.

So when you sit down to watch the latest “Rick and Morty” on Netflix this weekend, be thankful that Janet Jackson exposed her breast to the world on live TV and at least one young man was determined to help people watch videos of it.

And progress marches on.

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