Over the past 10 years, Netflix has led a revolution in the way the world consumes entertainment, and in doing so, it ruled over Wall Street.

The shares have soared nearly 4,100 per cent since the end of 2009, a gain that at one point made Netflix a larger company than Walt Disney Co. by market value. No other S&P 500 component has experienced a return that approached anything like Netflix's this decade; the second-best performer, MarketAxess Holdings​​​​​, is up a comparably paltry 2,600 per cent . The benchmark index itself is up about 190 per cent , while the S&P 500 communication-services index is up less than 60 per cent .

The advance reflects an industry-wide shift to streaming video, a trend that Netflix has been at the forefront of. While the company first introduced on-demand streaming in 2007, it became a central part of the company's identity in early 2013 with the debut of House of Cards, a high-profile and big-budget political thriller that would go on for six seasons and be nominated for dozens of Emmy Awards. The bulk of the company's decade-dominating surge came in the wake of the release.

The impact of streaming on the entertainment industry is difficult to overstate. Movie-theater chains have struggled against this new form of competition, while the cable industry has faced an exodus of "cord cutters" abandoning traditional television. Roku Inc., which operates as a platform for streaming services, recently predicted that ad revenue related to streaming would soon eclipse that of traditional TV, while even non-media companies like Facebook and Apple have been making investments into original content in a bid to keep users in their "ecosystems."