Netflix on Thursday passed a symbolic milestone and said it obtained its 10 millionth subscriber overnight. The number was achieved after adding about 600,000 new users in the month and a half since the start of 2009 and is growing faster than already seen in the large fall leap, when the movie rental firm added about 718,000 new regular users over the space of the last three months of 2008. The company expects to add between 100,000 and 300,000 more by the end of March.

The jump is credited directly to the company's online efforts, which let most existing subscribers to monthly DVD rentals also watch a subset of the Netflix catalog either on the web or on a supporting media hub. The company significantly added to its options in late 2008 with Xbox 360 support, with 1 million Xbox Live users accessing the service, as well as support on newer LG and Samsung Blu-ray players, TiVo DVRs, and web support for Macs in addition to previous Windows-only support.

Spiking demand gives momentum to subscription movie services, which have struggled outside of Netflix and are relatively rare. Amazon, Apple, VUDU and others currently rely on a conventional rent-per-movie format and typically haven't reported the number of video downloads or unique video buyers.