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States—After shipping out more than five billion DVDs in its trademark red envelopes, Netflix has finally called time on the movies-by-mail subscription service that launched the Hollywood streaming colossus.
The announcement, made in a letter to shareholders before this week’s earnings call, was greeted with bafflement by some broadband binge-watchers who did not know Netflix’s DVD business was still running—or that it existed in the first place.
But it also prompted nostalgic reflections among many of the tens of millions of US customers who had subscribed over the past quarter of a century, when plucky upstart Netflix first shipped out a DVD copy of “Beetlejuice” on March 10, 1998.
“We feel so privileged to have been able to share movie nights with our DVD members for so long,” wrote co-CEO Ted Sarandos, in a misty-eyed missive.
“To everyone who ever added a DVD to their queue or waited by the mailbox for a red envelope to arrive: thank you,” he added.
Netflix, which dominates the streaming market, began life in 1998 as a US-only DVD-by-mail rental company, taking on the then-mighty movie rental giant Blockbuster, before dipping into video-on-demand as a perk for its customers.
That shift enabled the company to expand globally.
And with fast broadband and mobile internet now blanketing not just the United States but much of the planet, DVDs had long been a declining business for the company.
