Netflix Will End Its DVD Service, 5.2 Billion Discs Later

[Cattledog]

Call up your Luddite loved ones and your nostalgic friends who still cherish physical media. After 25 years, Netflix is ending its DVD-by-mail business.

Before it was upending the entertainment industry and ushering in the streaming era, Netflix was a company whose business model revolved around sending DVDs through the mail in easily recognizable red-and-white envelopes. At its peak, in 2010, roughly 20 million subscribed to the DVD service. But the practice has long felt anachronistic, and the company said on Tuesday that it will ship its final DVDs to customers on Sept. 29.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/business/media/netflix-dvds-earnings.html

[marble falls]

1. It's a good thing. Plastic is the enemy.

[Blues Heron]

2. stacked like pancakes, 5.2 billion discs would reach almost 4000 miles high

roughly the radius of planet earth

[Shermann]

3. DVD's were great

I was an early adopter of DVD's and then Blu-Rays and even HD-DVD. DVD's in the mail were a treat, the selection was amazing and if you didn't mind being flexible you could watch something new every night. I am a home theater enthusiast who enjoys giving my big screen TV and 5.1 speaker system a workout.

Blu-Rays were a disappointment from Day 1. The players seemed clunky and slow, and it became common to have un-skippable commercials on discs that you PURCHASED. Not cool. Then there is the issue of unreadable media which seemed to get worse by the day. You pull the disc out, clean it off, put it back in, then have to fast forward to where you were (after watching the commercials again). VHS didn't have that problem!

When streaming became mainstream, the fate of discs was sealed. I tapped out before Ultra HD Blu-ray.

[tanyev]

4. Lots of stuff is still not available to stream.

We’re not Luddites, and I’ve got over 100 DVDs in my queue that are not available to stream at Netflix and probably anywhere else. Some of them may be available through Kanopy, and I’ve been thinking of signing up for PBS Passport. Guess I’ll definitely do that after Sept. 29.

[Easterncedar]

5. I'm with you

I have loved the selection. I will pick up and move on, but I may have to watch Key Largo one more time

[SeattleVet]

6. Frantically rearranging our queues to put the ones we most want to see at the top.

Very little of what we have been watching is available on their streaming service.

We'll probably have to rearrange our schedules a bit so we can watch a lot more of these before the DVD service ends.

I can see why they're doing it, but we're definitely going to miss it.

[tanyev]

7. Today's my day off and that what I spent most of my morning on.

Deleting everything I was only mildly interested in and bumping up the ones I really, really want to see.

My library has a pretty sizable and diverse collection of DVDs. In the short term this will probably increase their circulation. Long term, I guess the days of that collection are numbered, too. They already got rid of their collection of music CDs.